Thanks to a new special T-shirt created by the nanotechnology researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, it is possible that very soon we will have a new method to power small electronic devices.

Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his colleagues are developing a shirt that harvests energy from the wearer's physical motion and converts it into electricity.

Their project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and described in the Feb. 14 issue of Nature, is based on pairs of textile fibers covered with zinc oxide nanowires.

The fibers generate electricity in response to applied mechanical stress. Known as "the piezoelectric effect," the resulting current flow from many fiber pairs woven into a shirt or jacket could allow the wearer's body movement to power a range of portable electronic devices.

The fibers could also be woven into curtains, tents or other structures to capture energy from wind motion, sound vibration or other mechanical energy.

"The two fibers scrub together just like two bottle brushes with their bristles touching, and the piezoelectric-semiconductor process converts the mechanical motion into electrical energy," explained Zhong Lin Wang.  "Many of these devices could be put together to produce higher power output."

Wang and collaborators Xudong Wang and Yong Qin have made more than 200 of the fiber nanogenerators.  Each is tested on an apparatus that uses a spring and wheel to move one fiber against the other.  They estimate that a square meter of fabric made from the special fibers could theoretically generate as much as 80 milliwatts of power.