New carbon nanotube yarn stretches to light up LED [Full text]

Scientific and technological developments "Simply put, you get a yarn, stretch it, it will generate electricity. Jacket sewn into them, no external power supply, people will be able to breathe normally generates an electrical signal." University of Texas at Dallas Dr. Carter Haynes of the Nano Research Institute said in an interview with a research report on Sino-foreign cooperative research recently published in the journal Science.

This yarn, called Twistron, is spun from many carbon nanotubes. The diameter of a single carbon nanotube is 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. In order to make the yarn highly elastic, the researchers continuously improve the twist, making it a spring-like structure.

"The yarn is essentially a supercapacitor, but it does not require an external power source to charge it," Dr. Li Na of the Nano Research Institute told the Science Daily reporter. Because the chemical potential of the carbon nanotubes and the electrolyte is different, when the yarn is immersed in the electrolyte, a portion of the charge is embedded therein. When the yarn is stretched, the volume is reduced, the charges are brought closer to each other, the voltage generated by the charge is increased, and electrical energy is obtained.

“When stretched at a rate of 30 times per second, the yarn produces 250 watts per kilogram of peak electrical power. A yarn weighing less than the fly can light up one LED each time it is stretched.” Nano Research According to Dr. Ray Bowman, director of the Institute and author of the article, the electric power per unit weight of the Twistron yarn can be increased by more than 100 times compared to other woven fabrics.

It is worth mentioning that brine can also be used as an electrolyte. The output of the power generation yarn can be magnified in proportion to the increase in the yarn volume and the increase in the number of yarns working in parallel. "If you reduce production costs, Twistron can eventually be used to generate electricity in the waves," Bowman said.

It is reported that the most suitable application of carbon nanotube yarns currently is to supply power for sensors or IoT communications. "Based on our average output power, only 31 milligrams of yarn can be used to transmit 2 kilobytes of packets every 10 seconds for the IoT in a radius of 100 meters."

Original title: New carbon nanotube yarn stretches to light LED