Thread-like pumps can be woven into clothes

The fiber pumps knit into fabric © LMTS EPFL Researchers have developed fiber-like pumps that allow high-pressure fluidic circuits to be woven into textiles without an external pump. Soft supportive exoskeletons, thermoregulatory clothing, and immersive haptics can therefore be powered from pumps sewn into the fabric of the devices themselves. Many fluid-based wearable assistive technologies today require a large and noisy pump that is impractical - if not impossible - to integrate into clothing. This leads to a contradiction: wearable devices are routinely tethered to un­-wearable pumps. Now, researchers at the Soft Transducers Laboratory ( LMTS ) in the School of Engineering have developed an elegantly simple solution to this dilemma. "We present the world's first pump in the form of a fiber; in essence, tubing that generates its own pressure and flow rate," says LMTS head Herbert Shea. "Now, we can sew our fiber pumps directly into textiles and clothing, leaving conventional pumps behind." The research has been published in the journal Science.