Soon, a jacket which charges your phone

What if you had a jacket which served a dual purpose — beat the summer heat and simultaneously charged your mobile? A Kolkata-based scientist and his team is designing a jacket, especially for traffic police and those who work in the sun for long hours. Vanita Srivastava reports.

What if you had a jacket which served a dual purpose — beat the summer heat and simultaneously charged your mobile?

Santipada GonChaudhary, a Kolkata-based scientist, and his team is designing a jacket, especially for traffic police and those who work in the sun for long hours.

Apart from being fitted with cooling elements, the jacket will have a solar cell in the pocket with a connecting lead that can be used for charging a mobile. Solar cells varying between 2.5-3 inches in size would be embedded in each shirt to generate around 400 watts of energy, sufficient to charge mobile phones.

“A prototype will be ready in a few months. The design and the components have been procured. We are now integrating the solar cells. Once the prototype is ready we will give it to a company for mass production. It should cost around Rs 1600,” he said.

He said the jacket will be two layered — in the inner layer there will be six small fans embedded with a soft blade which can be twisted.

Besides the jacket we have also prepared a solar umbrella which will have solar cell on the top and just beneath a fan which can rotate. “This should cost around Rs 800.”