Soon, a low-cost and efficient way to wash your clothes with sunlight

You must have heard of solar technology, you must have read about different uses of sunlight. But what if we tell you that soon sunlight will be used to clean off your clothes, ending all your washing woes. Yes, its true! A spot of sunshine is all it could take to clean your clothes within minutes, as scientists, including those of Indian-origin, have developed a low-cost, efficient way to grow nanostructures on textiles that can degrade organic matter when exposed to light.

The research from RMIT University in Australia paves the way towards nano-enhanced textiles that can spontaneously clean themselves of stains and grime simply by being put under a light bulb or worn out in the Sun.

The process developed by the team has a variety of applications for catalysis-based industries such as agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals and natural products, and could be easily scaled up to industrial levels.

“The advantage of textiles is they already have a 3D structure so they are great at absorbing light, which in turn speeds up the process of degrading organic matter,” Rajesh Ramanathan from RMIT University said.

“There’s more work to do to before we can start throwing out our washing machines, but this advance lays a strong foundation for the future development of fully self-cleaning textiles,” he said.

The researchers including Dipesh Kumar and Vipul Bansal, also from RMIT University, worked with copper and silver-based nanostructures, which are known for their ability to absorb visible light.

When the nanostructures are exposed to light, they receive an energy boost that creates “hot electrons.” These “hot electrons” release a burst of energy that enables the nanostructures to degrade organic matter.

The challenge for researchers has been to bring the concept out of the lab by working out how to build these nanostructures on an industrial scale and permanently attach them to textiles.

The team’s approach was to grow the nanostructures directly onto the textiles by dipping them into a few solutions, resulting in the development of stable nanostructures within 30 minutes. When exposed to light, it took less than six minutes for some of the nano-enhanced textiles to spontaneously clean themselves.

“Our next step will be to test our nano-enhanced textiles with organic compounds that could be more relevant to consumers, to see how quickly they can handle common stains like tomato sauce or wine,” Ramanathan said. The research was published in the journal Advanced Materials Interfaces.