Google Glass and Apple iWatch inspire carbon nanotube fiber batteries

If the recently released Google Glass and soon-to-be-available Apple iWatch are any indication, wearable electronics may be the next big wave of the future. Although they offer some cutting-edge features, from head displays to biomedical monitoring, arguably the biggest bottleneck for wearable technologies is the battery. Not only must the batteries be very small and lightweight, but they also have to be powerful enough to meet the energy needs of the devices' many features.

In a new study published in Nano Letters, researchers Wei Weng, et al., at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, have tackled the power problem by designing and fabricating carbon nanotube (CNT) composite yarns that are wound onto a cotton fiber to create a high-performance Li-ion battery. The fibers, which have a diameter of about 1 mm, can then be woven into flexible textile, or cloth, and easily incorporated into flexible wearable electronics.

"A power source that can be directly and seamlessly integrated with the wearable electronics is highly needed," Weng told Phys.org. "Therefore, a power source in a fiber shape is desired because it is flexible and easily woven into a textile. We fabricated a fiber full Li-ion battery based on carbon nanotube fibers for the first time, and the fiber battery can be easily woven into an energy textile with a high performance."