The combination of rising populations, climate change, and depleted natural resources has emphasized the need for sustainable technology. This technology isn’t limited to big devices like photovoltaic panels and wind turbines; recently, a team of researchers has developed a textile capable of harnessing energy from both sunlight and wind.
The team developed a fabrication strategy that merged two different lightweight, low-cost polymer fibers to create energy-producing textiles. The first component of the textile is a microcable solar cell, able to gather power from ambient sunlight. The second is a nanogenerator capable of converting mechanical energy into electricity.
The photovoltaic portion of the textile was composed of a copper-coated polymer fiber that was then further coated with concentric layers of manganese, zinc-oxide/dye, and copper iodide—the zinc oxide is a photovoltaic material, while the copper helps harvest the charges. These solar-cell microcables were then woven together with a copper wire.
The second energy-generating material was based on triboelectric generation, where certain materials generate electricity when they experience friction. For their textile, the researchers used copper-coated polytetrafluoroethylene strips woven together with a copper wire.
The solar-cell microcables and triboelectric nanogenerator stripes were woven together with yet more copper wire. This was done using an industrial weaving machine, so no specialized equipment is needed. The end result was a wearable textile that exhibited an interlaced, single-layer structure with a thickness of 320µm.
The researchers demonstrated the ease of the weaving process by fabricating colorful textiles with arbitrary size and weaving patterns. They also integrated the textile into many common fabric items, such as cloth, curtains, and tents.
The team then optimized the properties of individual components, starting with the photovoltaic textile. Here, the electrical connection among the solar cell microcables strongly impacts the power output. By altering the number of strings and the connections they form, the researchers demonstrated the ability to tune the electrical output of the photovoltaic textile to fulfill various power delivery requirements. They also found that the weaving patterns impacted the ambient solar energy conversion and determined that the plain-weave structure generated the highest current density.