Multilayer textile-based woven batteries

Abstract

In recent years, conventional garments and electronic components have been combined to produce wearable diagnostic systems for monitoring vital signs in medical applications, or novel fashion effects, visual displays, or audio and computing systems. Another area of interest is the integration of sensors and actuators into fibers as the development of high efficiency conducting polymer actuator fibers and conducting polymer fibers with chemical sensing is about to be realized. Sophisticated smart textiles and wearable systems will, however, require wearable energy-storage capabilities. There is a great need to develop fiber-based batteries that contribute to a deeper integration of active smart components in textiles and hence to realize a stand-alone smart textile system. We followed this approach and present in this paper our first results on textile-based batteries. We used combination of different metal coated textile structures serving as electrodes. On both electrodes thin gel-like layers of gelatine-based electrolyte filled with a metal salt were applied. Finally, I-V curves of different structures were measured.