The demand for wearable power sources has been growing rapidly in the modern era of portable electronics. It is essential to make these power sources more comfortable and fit for the human body, especially for some medical applications in which case we need to wear it day and night. Energy harvesting and storage devices in the form of a common-looking fabric is thus of a great interests in recent years. Herein, we have successfully woven out a type of micro-cable power textile for simultaneously harvesting energy from ambient sunshine and mechanical movement. Solar cells fabricated from lightweight polymer fibers into micro cables are then woven via a scalable shuttle-flying process with fiber-based triboelectric nanogenerators to create a hybrid energy harvesting fabric. The hybrid power fabric is just 320 µm thick, fabricated with a size of 4 cm by 5 cm, was demonstrated to charge a 2 mF commercial capacitor up to 2 V in 1 min under ambient sunlight in the presence of mechanical excitation, such as human motion and wind blowing. Based on the similar strategy, a novel solid solar energy harvesting and storage hybrid textile combining both photovoltaic cells and super-capacitors were also designed and realized, in order to provide power at dark condition within a single textile. With such features as low-cost, thinness, light-weight, being flexible and wearable, as well as colorful appearance, this work represents a significant step towards the development of large scale energy harvesting and storage for wearable electronics and self-powered home technology. Some recent publications were selected as “Research Highlights” by Nature and the “9 most impressive social innovation goods from October” of Yahoo News in 2016.

References

[1] J. Chen#, Y. Huang#, N. Zhang, H. Zou, R. Liu, C. Tao, X. Fan*, Z. L. Wang*, Nature Energy. 2016, 1, 16138.

[2] N. Zhang#, J. Chen#, Y. Huang, W. Guo, J. Yang, J. Du, X. Fan*, C. Tao*, A Wearable All‐Solid Photovoltaic Textile, Advanced Materials, 2016, 28 (2), 263-269

[3] Z. Chai#, N. Zhang#, P. Sun, Y. Huang, C. Zhao, H. Fan, X. Fan*, W. Mai*, ACS Nano. 10 (2016) 9201–9207.