Solar Textiles: Collaborating to Craft a Powerful Cloth

Abstract

During the Upper Paleolithic, string was the “unseen weapon that allowed the human race to conquer the earth,” according to Elizabeth Barber. The invention of fishlines, tethers, nets, and leashes represented a ‘string revolution’ that was every bit as pivotal for humankind the harnessing of steam in the Industrial Revolution.

In the 21st Century, the challenge is not to conquer the earth, but to sustain it, and the revolutionary power of textile technology has not diminished. To contribute to this revolution, artists and designers must inform and expand their research and practice to look beyond the perceived boundaries of their disciplines to engage with the hard sciences and with industry.

Presenting her personal practice as emblematic of this interdisciplinary approach, fiber artist Professor Marianne Fairbanks details her pursuit of wearable solar technology from early experiments incorporating solar panels into jackets, to co-founding Noon Solar, a small business manufacturing sustainably produced handbags with integrated flexible solar panels, to her current collaboration with chemist Trisha Andrews to create a textile that is itself a solar collector.

This current project uses a process known as chemical vapor deposition to create organic dye-based solar cells on multiple textile substrates. Pilot experiments confirm that films of commodity pigments can indeed be deposited onto a wide range of arbitrary substrates, including fabrics, to create photovoltaic cells. In this collaboration, historic textile patterns and weave structures inform cutting edge technology in the search to identify configurations for building a circuit that is both optimally efficient and aesthetically appealing.

Textiles are light-weight, pliable, and durable. A successful solar-harvesting textile would serve as a foundation for wearable technology capable of providing renewable energy for the ubiquitous and ever-expanding array of personal electronics. A textile capable of generating energy would have revolutionary implications for a range of fields including fashion, satellite technology, military applications, and a variety of consumer products, from everyday garments and accessories, to tents, to curtains and upholstery – to everything under the sun.