If you’re already into wearable electronics, chances are your sense of style hasn’t gone beyond smartwatches that display emails or smart backpacks that charge phones.
But you may soon be able to up your wearable electronics game now that a team of scientists in China have come up with a novel way to use a 3D printer to print flexible fibers onto clothes that can harvest and store electricity. Using a coaxial needle, the scientists have created patterns, pictures and lettering on fabric, and they’ve enabled these creations to turn movement into energy. This development was covered in-depth recently in the Matter science journal.
"We used a 3D printer equipped with a home-made coaxial nozzle to directly print fibers on textiles and demonstrated that it could be used for energy-management purposes," said Yingying Zhang, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Tsinghua University, in a statement. "We proposed a coaxial nozzle approach because single-axial nozzles allow only one ink to be printed at a time, thus greatly restricting the compositional diversity and the function designing of printed architectures."
Zhang and her colleagues created their initial 3D-printed E-textiles with two inks. These included a carbon nanotube solution to create the conductive core of the fibers and a silkworm silk to create the insulating sheath. Injection syringes containing the two inks were linked to the coaxial nozzle that was fixed on the 3D printer. The scientists then drew patterns that included Chinese characters, the English word silk, and the picture of a pigeon.
This method, which differs from other approaches that involve manually sewing electrical components onto fabrics, can create versatile features for fabrics in one step. It’s also relatively inexpensive and easy to scale since, among other things, the nozzle can be used with existing 3D printers. One potential problem, however, is that the printing resolution is limited to the 3D printer’s mechanical movement accuracy and nozzle sizes.
For a look at where 3D printing plastics come from, check out the following article.