IIT-Kharagpur Researchers Use Wet Textiles To Generate Power

IIT-Kharagpur researchers have come up with a way to generate electricity from clothes that are dried in the natural ambiance.

Lead researcher of the project and professor at the Mechanical Engineering Department, Suman Chakraborty, explained,

To demonstrate the entire process, the researchers used around 50 pieces of clothes with 3,000 square meters in surface area. These clothes were being dried by washerman in tandem in a remote village.

In around 24 hours, the researchers could charge up to about 10 Volt, which is enough for a white LED to glow for more than 1 hour.

This innovation demonstrates that by using cellulose-based wet textile which is normally dried in a natural atmosphere, we can address remote areas’ essential power requirements, especially for the underprivileged community.

The electricity generation, when compared to other existing methods of harvesting energy from complex resources, happens in the natural ambiance. Moreover, while artificially-engineered power generation devices need external pumping resources, this method uses the fabric’s intrinsic surface energy to drive the current.

With a dry and hot environment like India’s, the natural evaporation is enhanced, meaning that the flow-induced electrical potential gets to be maximized. Therefore, the device might potentially be effective in regions that are warm and dry.

Chakraborty also explained that the electricity generation could be massively up-scaled by systematically drying clothes under the sunlight. This will eventually result in a low-cost utilitarian paradigm of power harvesting in rural settings.