"Bacteria battery" is hidden in textiles and absorbs your sweat to generate electricity.

The Binghamton University team in New York has recently developed a new bio-battery, this time based on textiles that can be stretched arbitrarily, while electric drives the behavior of bacteria exchanging electrons between molecules. Your saliva and sweat are bacteria-generating. Source of nutrition.

A year ago, the team led by Seokheun Choi, an assistant professor of electronics and information engineering at Binghamton University, has launched a paper bio-battery that folds multiple times without affecting power generation, and the battery power is folded. The degree varies.

Recently, the team has released a new "Textile Bio Battery" after the improvement, and has a stable power generation capability in repeated tensile and torsion tests. A biofuel cell is a bioelectrochemical-based battery system that uses natural bacteria and simulated bacterial interactions on fabrics to generate a current-initiating chemical reaction. Simply put, bacteria are used to trigger the reduction/oxidation reaction, thereby exchanging electrons between molecules to generate electricity.

Previously, Seokheun Choi had used dirty water and saliva to test the ability of bacteria to generate electricity, but the application of bio-batteries in wearable electronics was very underdeveloped because bacteria could cause health problems.

However, Seokheun Choi believes that the number of bacteria in the human body is more than that of cells. If it is not used as a resource, it is too wasteful. Therefore, his latest intention is to target the natural secretion of the human body: sweat, one of which is called Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The bacteria (Pseudomonas aeruginosa)" acted as a biocatalyst, resulting in a device with a maximum power output of 6.4 μW/cm 2 and a current density of 52 μA/cm 2 , similar to other flexible paper microbial fuel cells.

According to New Atlas, all battery components are integrated into a single piece of fabric with no barrier between the anode and cathode. The anode chamber is designed to be hydrophilic to conduct electricity, to obtain electricity from bacteria in the sweat, and the cathode to use silver oxide and redox reactions as solid materials for textile electronics.

Compared with traditional batteries or other enzyme fuel cells, microbial fuel cells can be the best power source for wearable electronic products, because the sweat that is continuously secreted is a potential fuel to support the vitality of bacteria, providing a stable enzymatic reaction and allowing microbial fuel cells to Long-term operation, that is to say, in the future, your clothes or socks can absorb your sweat while powering the wearable instrument, monitoring the relevant exercise results at any time.

This paper was published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.