[LINK] Cottoning on to new power solutions

[David Boxall]

Doesn't sound very comfortable.

 From 
<http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/hot-news-in-cleantech-storing-energy-in-t-shirts-14402>

> Speaking of flexible energy storage devices, a University of South Carolina-led team has been developing a way to turn a regular old t-shirt into just that. Discovery News reported this week that the team of engineers claim they have have successfully transformed a $5 cotton t-shirt into a flexible, highly conductive component, which is capable of charging devices. The research, recently published in the journal Advanced Materials, explains how the team worked to make the cotton highly conductive using several “recipes.”
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> USC mechanical engineer Profssor Xiaodong Li, who led the development with postdoc Dr Lihong Bao, says they started the process by soaking the cotton in a sodium fluoride solution for an hour; they then dried it in a preheated oven for three hours, and heated it in a hotter furnace for an hour. At the end of all this, the cotton had changed into activated carbon – charred-looking material that could nonetheless still be folded. The engineers then coated it with a nano-layer of the conductive metal manganese oxide – and there you have it, a super capacitor (that is, an energy storage device that is able to respond more quickly than a battery to power needs).
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> Testing has shown that the converted t-shirt’s performance is on par with other carbon-based super capacitors: After 1,000 cycles it had 97.3 per cent retention. “This is a very simple low-cost process, and it’s green,” says Li. As well as using a renewable plant-based material, the research group estimates that using cotton directly from textile mills could be as much as 10 times cheaper than chemically processing coal or petroleum into activated carbon. Of course, the process would need to be scaled up to get to market, and Li says that for this next phase, he’s looking for a potential industry partner. He’s also reaching out to state government leaders about using this process to help revive local textile production.
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-- 
David Boxall                    |  When a distinguished but elderly
                                |  scientist states that something is
http://david.boxall.id.au       |  possible, he is almost certainly
                                |  right. When he states that
                                |  something is impossible, he is
                                |  very probably wrong.
                                                  --Arthur C. Clarke