To make comfortable wearable electronics, a group of researchers in China has developed a 3D printer that deposits electronic flexible fibres onto transitional textiles or clothes. Researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing printed patterns that can harvest and store electricity onto fabrics. With a 3D printer equipped with a coaxial needle, they drew patterns, pictures, and lettering onto cloth, giving it the ability to transform movement into energy. "We used a 3D printer equipped with a home-made coaxial nozzle to directly print fibres on textiles and demonstrated that it could be used for energy-management purposes," explained, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Tsinghua University. "We proposed a coaxial nozzle approach because single-axial nozzles allow only one ink to be printed at a time, thus greatly restricting the compositional diversity and the function designing of printed architectures."
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