Smart Textiles for Electricity Generation

Abstract

Textiles have been concomitant of human civilization for thousands of years. With the advances in chemistry and materials, integrating textiles with energy harvesters will provide a sustainable, environmentally friendly, pervasive, and wearable energy solution for distributed on-body electronics in the era of Internet of Things. This article comprehensively and thoughtfully reviews research activities regarding the utilization of smart textiles for harvesting energy from renewable energy sources on the human body and its surroundings. Specifically, we start with a brief introduction to contextualize the significance of smart textiles in light of the emerging energy crisis, environmental pollution, and public health. Next, we systematically review smart textiles according to their abilities to harvest biomechanical energy, body heat energy, biochemical energy, solar energy as well as hybrid forms of energy. Finally, we provide a critical analysis of smart textiles and insights into remaining challenges and future directions. With worldwide efforts, innovations in chemistry and materials elaborated in this review will push forward the frontiers of smart textiles, which will soon revolutionize our lives in the era of Internet of Things.

A Machine‐Fabricated 3D Honeycomb‐Structured Flame‐Retardant Triboelectric Fabric for Fire Escape and Rescue

“…[ 3 ] Among them, decorative textiles are mainly used indoors, such as in houses, hotels, theaters, schools, hospitals, etc. These decorative textiles have lots of features such as noise reduction, [ 4 ] lightweight, [ 5 ] breathability, [ 6 ] washability, [ 7 ] adjustability, [ 8 ] flexibility, [ 9 ] and other additional functional performance. [ 10 ] Therefore, compared with the film or strip electronic devices, [ 11 ] decorative textiles would be a better choice for indoor energy harvesting or signal monitoring.…”

Wireless battery-free wearable sweat sensor powered by human motion

“…Battery-free systems powered by near-field communication (NFC) are reported (24,25) but could suffer from short operation distance. As an alternative, energy can be harvested from renewable, portable, and sustainable sources such as solar light, biofluids, and human motion to power future wireless wearable electronics (26)(27)(28)(29).…”

“…Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), which convert the mechanical energy created by human motion into electrical energy via coupling of inductive and triboelectric effects (30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35), offer a highly attractive energy harvesting strategy to power wearable sweat sensors during intensive physical activities as their operation is independent from uncontrollable external sources such as sunlight or wireless power transmitters. Despite the advantage, most of the existing TENG-based devices suffer from low power intensity, inefficient power management, and a lack of power continuity and longevity; thereby, the use of a TENG to continuously power a fully integrated wireless wearable molecular sensor system has not been reported (28,(36)(37)(38)(39).…”

Piezoelectric sensor based on graphene-doped PVDF nanofibers for sign language translation

“…Nowadays, pressure and bending angle sensors are mainly based on signals caused by a changing force [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. Plenty of measurement methods, using different materials and different principles, have been proposed in recent years [26]. Although these sensors can detect various interactions between humans and machines, the indispensability of external power sources greatly narrow their application scopes [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35].…”