Tiny Fibers in Fabric Could Turn Sun's Heat Into Energy

Researchers at Rice University use carbon nanotubes sewn into fabrics to display a new potential for energy harvesting.

“Carbon nanotube fibers have been on a steady growth path and are proving advantageous in more and more applications,” said chemical and biomolecular engineer Matteo Pasquali  . “Rather than wasting carbon by burning it into carbon dioxide, we can fix it as useful materials that have further environmental benefits in electricity generation and transportation.”

Transcript

00:00:01 in this video we demonstrate powering a light emitting diode using a textile thermoelectric generator the figure on the left hand side shows the schematic image of our textile power generator it consists of carbon native thread with steel thread in between which were sewn onto a t-shirt using a commercial sewing machine

00:00:24 the entire circuit to power the led is shown on the right hand side we have power generators connected in series a capacitor an led and a switch this is what the actual devices look like there are four devices each of them has 15 carbon negative thread with steel thread in between and all of them are connected

00:00:47 electrically in series and thermally in parallel t-hole sites are heated by hot plates while t coil size are at room temperature this creates a temperature gradient along the carbonation thread which in turn generates power right now the switch is connected to a so we are charging the capacitor with

00:01:10 these four thermoelectric power generators now we will switch to b which will discharge the capacitor to light up an led and yes we can see the light came out let's do this again we switch back to a to charge the capacitor the multimeter is monitoring the voltage

00:01:34 drop across the capacitor and we can see the voltage value is increasing now we switch back to b and again we could see the led turned on