Glasgow University team power wearables with sweat

Engineers from the Bendable Electronics and Sensing Technologies (BEST) group at Glasgow University have developed a new type of flexible supercapacitor which is said to replace the electrolytes found in conventional batteries with sweat.

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They said it can be fully charged with 20 microlitres of fluid and is robust enough to survive 4,000 cycles of the types of flexes and bends it might encounter in real-world use. A paper detailing the research, funded by EPSRC and the Royal Society, is published in Advanced Materials.

It works by coating polyester cellulose cloth in a thin layer of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate – or PEDOT:PSS, which acts as the supercapacitor’s electrode. Polyester cellulose cloth is particularly absorbent, and PEDOT:PSS offers flexibility, high conductivity and environmental friendliness.

As the cloth absorbs its wearer’s sweat, the positive and negative ions in the sweat interact with the polymer’s surface, creating an electrochemical reaction which generates energy.