MIT Engineers Produce the World’s Longest Flexible Fiber Battery
fliptop writes:
MIT engineers have produced the world's longest flexible fiber battery. The rechargeable battery can be woven and washed, and could provide power for fiber-based electronic devices and sensors:
The researchers envision new possibilities for self-powered communications, sensing, and computational devices that could be worn like ordinary clothing, as well as devices whose batteries could also double as structural parts.
In a proof of concept, the team behind the new battery technology has produced the world's longest flexible fiber battery, 140 meters long, to demonstrate that the material can be manufactured to arbitrarily long lengths.
[...] The new fiber battery is manufactured using novel battery gels and a standard fiber-drawing system that starts with a larger cylinder containing all the components and then heats it to just below its melting point. The material is drawn through a narrow opening to compress all the parts to a fraction of their original diameter, while maintaining all the original arrangement of parts.
[...] The fact that they were able to make a 140-meter fiber battery shows that "there's no obvious upper limit to the length. We could definitely do a kilometer-scale length," [MIT postdoc Tural Khudiyev] says. A demonstration device using the new fiber battery incorporated a "Li-Fi" communications system - one in which pulses of light are used to transmit data, and included a microphone, pre-amp, transistor, and diodes to establish an optical data link between two woven fabric devices.
Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.
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