Future Wear

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 Future Wear

FROM THE APRIL 2018 ISSUE
 
If one MIT researcher has his way, our fabric could be the next great technological frontier.
By Jonathon Keats
 
Kayana Szymczak

In a cluttered subterranean laboratory at MIT, Jung Tae Lee is attempting to make a battery as long and thin as a fishing line. With a focused gaze, the postgraduate researcher adjusts the knobs on an imposing blue machine that heats up and stretches out filament. “Must stabilize before making active fiber,” he mutters.

Benjamin Grena is more loquacious. The grad student explains that the blue machine, which stands nearly twice his height, is a draw tower, a custom version of an industrial appliance used to extrude glass rods into fiber-optic cable. Lee will make his device by elongating, or drawing, a fat polymer cylinder that has been embedded with electrodes and injected with battery fluids. The trick is to keep the metals and liquids aligned, as Lee heats and stretches the cylinder until its diameter is ideally a mere 1/200th its original size — a high-precision variation on pulling saltwater taffy. “And then,” Grena says, “you’ll have a power source that can be woven together with sensors and other functional fibers.”

http://discovermagazine.com/2018/apr/future-wear

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We're not in the future yet until we are all wearing silver jumpsuits.