Electronic cotton
December 29, 2011 | Source: IEEE Spectrum
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]