How would you like it if your phone started charging whenever you dropped it into your pocket? That may eventually be possible, thanks to a carbon nanotube-based ink that can turn many common fabrics into conductors, or even components of a charge-storing supercapacitor. These won’t be showing up in a clothing store near you anytime soon, however, as ensuring that the fabrics only direct the charge to appropriate devices—and not, say, to a sensitive body part—will be a separate engineering challenge.
Textile fibers are actually uniquely suited to transforming into electronics when combined with the seemingly ubiquitous carbon nanotube. Fibers made of cellulose, like cotton or polyester, are highly porous and can absorb large amounts of water and other polar solvents. When flexible single-walled carbon nanotubes are placed near polymers like these fibers, they have large van der Waals interactions with them, and can be treated with acid that helps them form hydrogen bonds with the fabric. This allows the flexible carbon nanotubes to wrap around the fibers in very high volumes, as the porous fabric gives the nanotubes a large surface area to work with.
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