People power!
It’s one of those everyday annoyances, finding yourself with a flat battery in any one of the gadgets we carry around constantly now. I would love the option of charging your phone or your ipod while you’re out and about. And it looks like that may be possible soon, with a recent report in Nature on power production from nanotextiles (watch me carefully avoid the use of the pun ‘power dressing’!) The textiles consist of zinc oxide nanowires which generate electricity by the piezoelectric effect, in other words, produce electricity when under mechanical stress. The zinc oxide nanowires are embedded around a Kevlar fibre to produce something looking like a bottle-brush. Some are then coated in a nanolayer of gold, to act as an electrode. These are aligned and the ‘bristles’ rub past each other, creating the electrical current (see picture). Once optimised, this nanotextile should provide a simple and cheap way to convert energy of walking into electrical energy. This report follows an earlier report of a knee brace designed to harvest energy from walking. Maybe one day we will be able to throw our old chargers out and simply plug in and go for a stroll!
