Green Energy? Cotton T-shirts could soon charge your phone?!?

Lead researcher Xiaodong Li said his team knew that future body armor would need a flexible power source. And because the scientists work in South Carolina, which used to have a big cotton industry, they thought,

‘Why not use a cotton T-shirt as the energy device?’

Although others have used cotton in devices, Li said that to the best of his knowledge his research group is the first to activate a cotton T-shirt and build it into a super capacitor. Their device’s performance is on par with other carbon-based super capacitors, according to their testing. After 1,000 cycles it had 97.3 percent retention.

“This is a very simple, low-cost process, and it’s green,” Li said. In addition to starting with a renewable plant-based material, he and his research group estimate that using cotton directly from textile mills could be as much as 10 times cheaper than chemically processing coal or petroleum into activated carbon.