At IIT Kharagpur, electricity generated from wet clothes

Researchers at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, Mechanical department here have generated electricity from clothes drying in natural ambience.

The research was done at a ‘dhobi ghat’ using 50 wet clothes with a surface area of 3,000 square meters which was put for drying by washermen in a remote village.

The clothes were connected to a commercial supercapacitor. In the process, the researchers were able to reliably charge up to around 10 volts in almost 24 hours. This stored energy is enough to glow a white LED for more than 1 hour.

Speaking to ANI Professor Suman Chakraborty of Mechanical Engineering Department, IIT Kharagpur said: “We have done very significant consistent research to figure out that this is indeed a possible phenomenon and developed a technology to source electricity from clothes drying in open space. This power may not be used for large scale application but is good enough to change the lives of a rural community.” Demonstrating the research Professor Chakraborty said: “Clothes are illusively complex, if we look into a cloth we will see that it is made of a very complex yet regular structure of cellulose fibers. These cellulose fibers have certain charges in their walls. Now if you immerse a piece of cloth in a salt solution and have transpiration by surface tension then the salt solution will flow and ionise as it moves along the different passages of the cellulose fibers. The movement of ions in a continuous process generates a continuous voltage. If connected to an external register and can generate small power.”

“Now we have developed a technique where we have used a surface energy of the device in order to drive the liquid through the device and also we have utilized the evaporation from the surface so that we get the continuous migration of the ions,” said PhD scholar Sankha Shuvra Das of Mechanical Engineering Department, IIT Kharagpur.