Laundry is no longer needed

Laundry is no longer needed: a special nano-coating allows the fabric to be cleansed when exposed to light

Laundry is no longer needed

Fabric with nano coating

The process of washing things, despite the high degree of automation even in a domestic environment, remains quite cumbersome. The person is required to load into the washing machine dose of powder or liquid, put the dirty clothes, removing clothes, to disassemble and hang them to dry. However, thanks to the work of researchers from the Royal Institute of Technology in Melbourne (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology RMIT) in the future procedure of washing will no longer be a necessity. Australian researchers developed a nano-coating allows the fabric to self-clean whenever the surface exposed beams.

Imagine that you hang a dirty shirt near the window, and after a while it becomes pure, or go for a walk on a Sunny day in the not too fresh t-shirt, which on the return sparkles with crystal clarity. And these are the miracles produced by nanostructures of copper and silver, specially grown on the surface of the fibers of the fabric.

When the surface of tiny metal structures are the photons of light from the source of natural or artificial origin, they have free "hot" electrons having sufficiently high energy. These electrons, moving at high speed, collide with molecules of organic substances and create small explosions that break down these molecules. This technology can remove or significantly reduce the green footprint from the grass remaining in shape from a fall during a football match, but she is not yet able to cope with traces of ink remaining on the clothes after you replace the cartridges in the printer.

The nanostructure on the fabric

Laundry is no longer needed

Nanostructures on the surface of the fabric fibers are grown by sequential immersion of a normal tissue in several different solutions. The whole process of cultivation is done in about 30 minutes time, after which even quite significant pollution is cleared in just six minutes of being in bright sunlight.

The researchers argue that the technology of applying nano-coating is very simple, completely harmless to humans and can be used on an industrial scale. It gives this technology an advantage over other similar technologies self-cleaning fabrics and surfaces.