A new wearable fabric that generates electricity from both sunlight and motion could let you power your cell phone or smart watch by walking around outside. Researchers made the textile by weaving together plastic fiber solar cells and fiber-based generators that produce electricity when rubbed against each other.

The 0.32-millimeter-thick fabric is lightweight, flexible, breathable, and uses low-cost materials, its creators say. It could be integrated into clothes, tents, and curtains, turning them into power sources when they flap or are exposed to the sun. By harvesting solar and mechanical energy, the power-generating cloth could work day and night, its inventors say.

“The hybrid power textile could be extensively applied not only to self-powered electronics but also possibly to power generation on a larger scale,” Zhong Lin Wang at Georgia Tech, Xing Fan at Chongqing University in Chongqing, China, and their colleagues write in a research published today in the journal Nature Energy.

Wang and his colleague report that a patch of the power textile wrapped on a person’s hand charged a cell phone and a watch when the person stood in daylight in ambient wind conditions and moved their hand.

Wang has made many motion-harvesting devices before, from energy-generating flags to biodegradable power sources for medical implants. The underlying phenomenon is the triboelectric effect,…[Read more]