KOCHI: Thiruvananthapuram may be humid and hot, but it has provided the perfect setting for a team of scientists at IISER-Thiruvananthapuram to develop a fabric that can come in handy in the cold winter weather. The fabric is a semi-conducting material, which can help discharge static charge.
The work was published in Angewandte Chemie, an international journal published on behalf of German Chemical Society. The team has filed for a patent, as conducting fabrics can find many takers in the West.
Static electricity is an issue which causes much concern in cold countries according to Kana M Sureshan, the School of Chemistry associate professor who led the team. "Static charge, in dry winter air, has been the reason for many mishaps in western countries. There have been cases where machines even caught fire," he says.
The static charge on our body, if not discharged, can spark a huge fire. If the fabric we wear is a conducting material, there will be no extra static charge on our body. Existing attempts to make conducting fabrics involve physical blending of conducting materials such as carbon or metal with the fabric. However, these would get abraded or leached out during washing, according to Kana M Sureshan.
In the technique employed by his team, the entire fabric gets modified, and there is no question of a dopant getting abraded. "There is a strong interaction between sugar molecules, making it sticky. A fibre of cotton will be made of many many fibrils because of this high interaction. We have utilised this sticky nature of sugars," he says.
They dipped cotton into a sugar-based gelator. Because of the high sugar-sugar interaction, the gelator 'stuck' to cotton by means of hydrogen bonding. Attached to each molecule of the gelator were diacetylene motifs. The cotton glued with the gelator was subjected to ultraviolet irradiation.
Irradiation turned diacetylenes into polydiacetylenes, which are semiconducting materials. The resulting fibre turned pink. "That's okay. You can recolour it," says Kana M Suresh. The principal author is Baiju P Krishnan, a research scholar at IISER. The other authors were Somnath Mukherjee, Pacheri M Aneesh, Manoj A G Namboothiry, and Kana M Sureshan.