Electronic cotton

December 29, 2011 | Source: IEEE Spectrum
Conductive cotton ties in to a simple circuit.

Conductive cotton ties in to a simple circuit. (credit: Textiles Nanotechnology Laboratory at Cornell University)

Researchers in the United States, Italy, and France have invented transistors made from cotton fibers that could be woven into clothing capable of measuring pollutants, T-shirts that display information, and carpets that sense how many people are crossing them.

“We want to create a seamless interface between electronics and textiles,” says Juan Hinestroza, director of the Textiles Nanotechnology Laboratory at Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y.

To make a fiber conductive, the team coated each strand with gold nanoparticles and added a thin layer of a conductive polymer. They created an organic electrochemical transistor and an organic field-effect transistor by doping the conductive fibers with a semiconducting polymer.

Ref.: Giorgio Mattana et al., Organic electronics on natural cotton fibres, Organic Electronics, 2011 [doi: 10.1016/j.orgel.2011.09.001]