Wearable solar dress to charge your gadgets

Filed in archive High-Tech Textiles on March 13, 2010

What if your MP3 players continued to churn out music for eternity while you are on the move? Here comes a solar powered dress which will charge your gadgets through USB charger on your waist. This is light-pink solar dress from Liebman which uses ultrathin flexible solar cells for powering iPods and phones. For this purpose Cornell University teamed up with two Italian universities for creating cotton threads for the dress which can conduct electrical currents and at the same time remain light and comfortable.

For making the material conductive, researchers came out with a technique for permanently coating traditional cotton fibers with a combination of semiconductor polymers and nanoparticles. It has been kept at less than 100 nanometers thick for preserving the flexibility of the cotton. Here even simple knotting in treated threads work towards completing the circuit. This dress will be showcased at the annual Cornell Design League Fashion Show in Ithaca where a model will be walking in burgundy silk jersey leggings charging a BlackBerry phone.