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Updated: Mar 12, 2026
A Simple and Scalable Fabrication Method for Organic Electronic Devices on Textiles
Published on: March 13, 2017
Self-powered textile for wearable electronics by hybridizing fiber-shaped nanogenerators, solar cells, and
Zhen Wen1, Min-Hsin Yeh2, Hengyu Guo3
1School of Material Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0245, USA.; State Key Laboratory of Silicon Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Cyrus Tang Center for Sensor Materials and Applications, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.; Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Carbon-Based Functional Materials and Devices, Institute of Functional Nano and Soft Materials, Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu 215123, China.
Abstract:
Wearable electronics fabricated on lightweight and flexible substrate are believed to have great potential for portable devices, but their applications are limited by the life span of their batteries. We propose a hybridized self-charging power textile system with the aim of simultaneously collecting outdoor sunshine and random body motion energies and then storing them in an energy storage unit. Both of the harvested energies can be easily converted into electricity by using fiber-shaped dye-sensitized solar cells (for solar energy) and fiber-shaped triboelectric nanogenerators (for random body motion energy) and then further stored as chemical energy in fiber-shaped supercapacitors. Because of the all-fiber-shaped structure of the entire system, our proposed hybridized self-charging textile system can be easily woven into electronic textiles to fabricate smart clothes to sustainably operate mobile or wearable electronics.
