An interesting side to Alternative Energy is the development of Solar clothing. In April Bloomberg News printed an article about printing solar cells on paper and clothing. This innovation was invented by Miles Barr an MIT engineering student. As an update Here's an article from Fast Company about the military's use of Flexible Solar for clothes. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/lemelson-student-prize-barr.html
Miles Barr, winner of the 2012 $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize.
Photo courtesy of the Lemelson-MIT Program
Photo courtesy of the Lemelson-MIT Program
Fast Company
Solar Soldiers: MC10's Testing Its Flexible Energy Harvesters With The U.S. Army
BY NIDHI SUBBARAMAN |
The U.S. Army and MC10 will work together to scale up the flexible solar panel prototypes and assess their efficiency as functional battery chargers.
Flexible solar energy harvesters that can be sewn into the jackets and backpacks of U.S. soldiers could soon be powering up electronic devices in the field. MC10, a Cambridge startup that specializes in flexible electronics, has signed a contract with the army to develop and test its solar cell technology for military use. Over the course of this next year, the U.S. Army Natick Soldier RD&E Center and MC10 will work together to scale up the flexible solar panel prototypes MC10 has already built, and assess their efficiency as functional battery chargers.
MC10 specializes in re-engineering stiff, brittle parts of electronics into sleeker, softer, and stretchier versions of their former selves. MC10 has made steady headway in applying its techniques to build thin, soft sensors for use in surgeries and is testing those at partner sites like Boston's Mass. General Hospital. The company is perhaps furthest along in the devices they are building or for athletes. The sensors, which look like a square inch of tape, cling onto an athlete's forearm and record biological information like temperature, heart rate and hydration over time. In a recent partnership with NASCAR MC10 tested a sensor on race car driver Paulie Harakka as he competed.
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