Flexible Battery Lays Path for Bending Phones

MONTREAL, Canada – Maksim Skorobogatiy and colleagues at Polytechnic School of Montreal in Canada have designed a cloth which embeds batteries to provide electricity for gadgets woven in the garments.

The fabric, which looks like artificial leather, is made by inserting polyethylene oxide electrolyte between a lithium iron phosphate cathode and lithium titanate anode, and then stretching it through heating. The team then blended the stripes of this cloth into a cotton fabric using conductive threads to link the batteries in a order. This arrangement was made to lighten the LEDs in the garment.

According to Skorobogatiy, this cloth might be able to provide hundreds of volts of energy and can be used in times of emergency for backup plans. However, the team has now encountered a more difficult task that is to waterproof the technology and figuring a way to make it washable.

This could pave way for flexible phones, such as the Nokia Morph, imagined by the Nokia Research Centre.

A researcher at London College of Fashion, Sandy Black, believes that this technology could be used in bags, backpacks and garments used in medical-monitoring, to begin with.