Photo-powered all-in-one energy harvesting and storage fibers towards low-carbon smart wearables

Abstract

The concept of charging energy storage systems with photons is an attractive pathway to achieve a sustainable low-carbon society. Herein, we demonstrated a wearable energy textile that can be used to power various wearable electronics for full-day operation by solely charging with photons. The wearable energy textile was powered by zinc-ion fiber batteries that comprised of MoS2 coupled to a TiO2@Ti fiber as the cathode. Based on the electrochemical evaluations, the resulting “all-in-one” photo-powered Zn ion fiber batteries could be charged under ambient light and sun, with a photoconversion efficiency of close to 1 %. Under actual external environments, i.e., sunny or cloudy days, the wearable photo-powered energy textiles could power various applications with significantly extended battery usage duration, which helps to untether the need to stay connected to a power grid. As such, we believe that this work could present a potential way of achieving an all-in-one energy harvesting and storage textile to contribute towards a low-carbon society.