Wearable Textile Battery Rechargeable by Solar Energy

TLDR

Wearable electronics shift consumer tech by embedding flexible devices into clothing and accessories, yet lithium batteries lag due to fragile mechanical stability. The study aims to redesign battery components—current collector, binder, and separator—to enhance mechanical endurance for wearable applications. The authors replaced these components with robust materials and integrated flexible, lightweight solar cells onto the battery pouch to enable solar recharging while maintaining performance. The resulting textile batteries, in clothing and watchstrap forms, matched conventional metal‑foil cells electrochemically even after repeated folding and unfolding, demonstrating durable performance.

Abstract

Wearable electronics represent a significant paradigm shift in consumer electronics since they eliminate the necessity for separate carriage of devices. In particular, integration of flexible electronic devices with clothes, glasses, watches, and skin will bring new opportunities beyond what can be imagined by current inflexible counterparts. Although considerable progresses have been seen for wearable electronics, lithium rechargeable batteries, the power sources of the devices, do not keep pace with such progresses due to tenuous mechanical stabilities, causing them to remain as the limiting elements in the entire technology. Herein, we revisit the key components of the battery (current collector, binder, and separator) and replace them with the materials that support robust mechanical endurance of the battery. The final full-cells in the forms of clothes and watchstraps exhibited comparable electrochemical performance to those of conventional metal foil-based cells even under severe folding-unfolding motions simulating actual wearing conditions. Furthermore, the wearable textile battery was integrated with flexible and lightweight solar cells on the battery pouch to enable convenient solar-charging capabilities.