Now Cotton Is Not Just To Wear

Electronic Cotton

The next generation of wearable electronics could be a lot more comfortable, thanks to transistors made from cotton fibres. Such transistors may soon make for wearable electronics as comfy as your favourite pair of jeans or T-shirt.The day when your jeans, T-shirt or even underwear knows when you’re ill isn’t far away, say textile nano technologists.

Scientists at the Textiles Nanotechnology Laboratory at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and the University of Cagliari in Italy have found a way of making transistors from cotton fibres.

They say that the applications for their research could include carpets that know how many people have walked on them, firefighting suits that detect airborne pollutants and clothing that can incorporate heart-rate and sweat monitoring sensors.In the study, the researchers showed that they could make cotton behave like two types of transistors: organic electrochemical and organic field effect. By coating the cotton with a layer of gold nanoparticles, and then applying conductive or semiconductive coatings to the fiber, the layers were so thin that the flexibility of the cotton fibers were preserved.Cotton transistors won't match the speed of silicon transistors in typical microprocessors any time soon, but they could perform simple computational tasks. For example, a carpet could count the number of people in a room or sense the temperature.