IIT Kharagpur researchers awarded for generating power from clothes drying in open space

IIT Kharagpur has said that a group of researchers, who developed a mechanism for generating electricity from wet clothes that are left under the sun to dry, have been honoured with ‘Gandhian Young Technological Innovation Awards 2020’. The official Twitter handle on the institute posted about the award and extended ‘hearty congratulations’ to the entire team that includes Prof Suman Chakraborty, Prof Partha Saha and Dr Aditya Bandopadhyay, from the Department of Mechanical Engineering for their work ‘Electrical Power Generation from Wet Textile’.

A separate team has also been awarded for their work in the area of energy efficiency from IIT Kharagpur. Prof Sunando Dasgupta and his entire team from the Department of Chemical Engineering have been honoured for their work ‘Smart, Flexible, and Multi-Functional Thermal and Energy Management Systems for Next-Generation Electronic Devices’.

The team of professors had developed the mechanism to generate electrical energy from the clothes that are being left to dry in open space last year. Back then, Chakraborty had said that even though the power generated by the set up might ‘not be good enough’ especially for larger applications but it is still ‘good enough’ to make a difference in rural communities.

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The device has been tested in remote village

As per the IIT Kharagpur’s official website, the device developed by the researchers has been tested in a remote village across a surface area of 3,000 square metres. For the same, at least 50 clothes were put up for drying that were connected to a commercial supercapacitor which discharged electricity of around 10 Volt in at least 24 hours. This stored energy can further allow and LED bulb to glow for over an hour. 

The researchers who workers on the mechanism have been quoted by the official website elaborating on the science behind it. They said that the clothes individuals wear are usually made from cellulose-based textile that also has a network of nano-channels. Furthermore, the ions in saline water can move through that network by ‘capillary action’ which induces an electric potential in the entire process. The invention by IIT Kharagpur researchers has been published in ‘Nano Letters’, a science journal. 

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