Smart Fabrics: The Future of Fashion and Energy

ing that monitors your temperature, tracks your activity, or keeps you cozy all by itself without needing an external power source.

Imagine clothing that monitors your temperature, tracks your activity, or keeps you cozy all by itself without needing an external power source.

Well, all this and more is fast becoming a reality thanks to all the research and development happening at the intersection of tech and clothing.

Technological advancement has been transforming our lives by making our phones and home appliances smarter. Now, even our clothes are becoming smart, unlocking possibilities that pave the way for an exciting and more sustainable future.

The global smart textile market is already valued at $4.1bln and is projected to rise to $24.5 bln by 2032. Interestingly, energy harvesting currently accounts for the largest share of this market, according to Markets and Markets.

Energy harvesting is converting ambient energy into electrical energy to power autonomous electronic devices. This energy can be harvested from various sources, including mechanical and thermal. To create energy-harvesting textiles, active materials are usually added to the textile's surface or woven or embroidered into it.

Such smart fabrics can potentially be utilized as an alternative to batteries, which require recharging or periodic replacement because they contain only a finite amount of energy. In wearable textile applications, batteries tend to be rigid, bulky items that must be removed before washing and hence need improvement.

While still at a relatively early stage, this sector is growing rapidly, driven by a combination of factors, including technology advances, design, consumer demand, miniaturization, and government policies.

Now, let's take a look into the exciting innovations in the sector and the literal power of the clothes that we wear!

Smart Fabric to Convert Body Heat Into Electricity

One of the most recent and electrifying developments was made by researchers from the University of Waterloo in collaboration with a leading institution in textile science and engineering at Jiangnan University, who created a smart fabric that converts thermal energy from the body and sunlight into electrical power.

This smart fabric has the capability to generate power, observe health metrics, and track physical activity. These sensors allow the fabric to detect temperature changes and monitor pressure, stress, and chemical composition.

A promising application of this fabric is smart face masks that can track the temperature and rate of your breath as well as detect chemicals to help identify conditions like lung cancer and viruses. According to Yuning Li, director of the Printable Electronic Materials Lab at Waterloo and a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering:

“We have developed a fabric material with multifunctional sensing capabilities and self-powering potential (that) brings us closer to practical applications for smart fabrics.”

The fabric designed by the team is flexible, MXene-based, thermoelectric, and can precisely determine strain stimuli and temperature. To achieve this, the team developed a layer of adhesive polydopamine (PDA) on the surface of the nylon fabric, which facilitated the MXene attachment through hydrogen bonding.

MXene has been drawing a lot of attention for its rare combination of properties like layered structure, flexibility, large surface area, electric and metallic conductivity, biocompatibility, hydrophilicity, size tunability, and rich surface chemistry. The study noted:

“The resultant MXene-based thermoelectric fabric exhibits outstanding temperature detection capability and cyclic stability while also delivering excellent sensitivity, rapid responsiveness (60 ms), and remarkable durability in strain sensing (3200 cycles).”

The novel fabric is not only more cost-effective, durable, and stable than other fabrics on the market, but unlike the current wearable devices that need frequent recharging, this one can operate without requiring an external source of power. This way, the research demonstrates the huge potential of integrating conductive polymers and MXene with modern fabric tech for the advancement of smart fabrics.

Noting the various progress made in tech, including AI, which is evolving rapidly to offer advanced signal processing for health monitoring and the preservation of food and pharmaceuticals, Li argued that all these advancements rely on ‘comprehensive data collection, which traditional sensors—often cumbersome, expensive, and unwieldy—are unable to achieve.' This makes printed sensors, embedded in smart fabrics, ideal for continuous data collection and monitoring, Li added.

While this innovative fabric marks significant progress in making these applications feasible, the researchers will now focus on further improving the fabric's capabilities and incorporating it with electronic systems. A smartphone app may also be part of this future development to track and transmit data from the fabric to healthcare professionals for real-time, non-invasive health monitoring.

Pioneering Fabrics of the Future

Advancements in smart clothing have been happening rapidly for some time now. In 2016, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta created a micro-cable power fabric that could harvest energy from sunlight and motion.

For this, the scientists weaved thread with thin, fiber-based solar cells and triboelectric nanogenerators. The resultant smart fabric had a 320 μm thick single layer and could be integrated into tents, curtains, and various clothes. The textile, as per the study, could directly