Last updated April 12, 2019
Fancy charging your new or old cell phone? Just use your T-shirt. Thanks to scientists at the University of South Carolina, who have invented a new T-shirt that could charge up cell phones, it could now be a possibility. The gadget provides portable energy; something the scientists believe could come in quite handy in the future.
“In the future, you can imagine our cell phones will be just like a piece of paper you can roll up,” says University of South Carolina professor Xiaodong Li. Scientists tried a number of different ways to invent this one of a kind product, but only one of them was actually successful. In order to create the T-shirt, scientists purchased a normal cotton T-shirt for just $5, then dipped it in a sodium fluoride solution for around an hour. The scientists then dried the T-shirt for three hours in a pre-heated oven, after which it was again heated, this time in an even hotter furnace, for another hour.
Once this process had been completed, the shirt had somehow been transformed into activated carbon. Scientists then coated metal manganese oxide onto the T-shirt in order to store the energy. The T-shirt then actually proved to be capable of charging cell phones and more quickly than is the case with any other method.
“This is a very simple low cost process, and it’s green,” Li notes.