Fiber Battery for Innovating Textile Integration – BELIEVE

The aim of the BELIEVE project (BattErie fiLaire pour Integration tExtile innoVantE) is to create a power bank or external battery that is entirely woven. Its aim is to meet the power requirements of various smart textile projects. For a military application: physiological monitoring during operations, heating of textiles or feedback of information from the field. For civilian applications, these are mainly medical textiles that allow elderly people to stay at home longer and, more generally, reduce hospital stays while providing real-time medical monitoring.

The innovative aspects of this project concern the study and development of a battery in the form of a thread, the manufacturing processes of which are designed to be compatible with the industrial processes of the textile industry. The project focuses on the power bank as a complete system, with its output voltage regulation electronics and its inductively coupled charging circuit. The latter will also be realised in the form of wires that can be processed by the textile industry.

At the end of the project, a maturation phase is foreseen to bring the batteries produced in the laboratory to a level of realisation compatible with in-line textile yarn manufacturing processes under ambient temperature, pressure and humidity conditions.

A particular objective of this project is to position itself in the evaluation of the resistance to the various constraints throughout the life cycle of these devices (manufacturing, washing, wearing in operational conditions, recyclability). This last aspect is an important technological barrier to be overcome for the adoption of smart wearables in the future.