Your clothes can generate electricity

The clothes that you wear have the potential to generate electricity, according to researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur.

They have generated electricity from clothes drying in a natural ambience, according to an ANI report.

The researchers connected 50 wet clothes to a commercial super-capacitor. The process charged the capacitor to around 10 volts in almost 24 hours.

The amount of electricity generated was sufficient to run an LED bulb for more than an hour.

"Clothes are illusively complex, if we look into a cloth we will see that it is made of a very complex yet regular structure of cellulose fibres," said Professor Suman Chakraborty of the Mechanical Engineering Department, IIT Kharagpur. "These cellulose fibres have certain charges in their walls. Now if you immerse a piece of cloth in a salt solution and have transpiration by surface tension, then the salt solution will flow and ionise as it moves along the different passages of the cellulose fibres. The movement of ions in a continuous process generates a continuous voltage. If connected to an external register, it can generate small power."

He stated that though this power could not be used for large scale applications, it was good enough to change lives in a rural community.