Xiaodong (Chris) Li, recently appointed Rolls-Royce Commonwealth Professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science has been working on various innovations in the apparel industry. In 2010, Li made The New York Times’ ‘Year in Ideas’ list for developing a process to make an armored T-shirt. He dipped an off-the-shelf shirt in a boron-nickel solution and heated it to 1,160 degrees Celsius. The result: a boron-carbide nanowire and carbon-microfiber shirt that retains the stretchability of cotton. The shirt, which turns a basic black in the process, provides excellent protection against harmful UV rays and radiation.
Two years later, Li took another T-shirt and turned it into a wearable capacitor, a device capable of storing an electrical charge. He soaked the T-shirt in fluoride, baked it at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen and turned the cellulose in the cotton into activated carbon. He dedicated small swatches of the fabric to serve as electrodes and coated the fibers with nanostructured manganese oxide, producing a stable, high-performing supercapacitor
Li’s key insight was that he saw the cotton T-shirt material as both template and carbon source. Previous attempts to create armored fabric without this template were undermined by the tendency of the boron-carbide nanowires to bunch up. Li looks to nature as well as to everyday objects for inspiration. He wants to apply the knowledge he gains from nature and combine it with the techniques of nanotechnology to produce better products more efficiently.
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