Soon in your closet: an air conditioned shirt and a glowing skirt? Students from the Plastics Engineering Department are developing a new technology to create fabrics that conduct electricity and that are made from organic materials and which will be integrated into smart clothing items.

As part of the study, led by Dr. Elizabeth Amir, a staff member of the department, they want to take the field of “electronic wearables” one step up and make the clothes conductive without harming their properties. 

The first wearable technologies were born about fifteen years ago. Since then they have become a leading research are both in the fashion industry as well as in the plastics and electronics industry. In the beginning, the idea was that tiny electronic equipment would be combined in the surface area of the fabric, but the developments of the last few years have allowed for the creation of fabrics that create electricity and are based on organic materials in lab conditions. 

According to Dr. Amir “the possibility of combining two technologies that are seemingly entirely different - fabrics and conductive organic materials - is especially exciting since unlike metal, the organic materials are flexible, easy and allow for a variety of conductive properties, colors and reflectiveness.” 

In 1977 the research had a major breakthrough, for which it received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000: a synthetic plastic material that could conduct an electrical current under certain conditions. 

“This stage led to thousands of new organic materials being developed,” said Dr Amir. “Some of them were found to have marketable uses in electronic devices such as transistors, diodes and solar cells.”