Thu December 15, 2011 Chemists Unveil Future Self-Cleaning
Clothes A group of chemists have presented what they say is
self-cleaning fabric that could one day lead to jeans, shirts
and other clothing that dissolves stains and kills bacteria when
exposed to sunlight. The scientists announced their findings in
the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, which is peer-
reviewed and published by the American Chemical Society. Pop
Science reports that they accomplished the feat by coating
cotton with titanium dioxide, which oxidizes organic material:
Other researchers have incorporated titanium dioxide into
clothes before, but they don't get clean unless exposed to
ultraviolet light, which isn't exactly practical. Mingce Long of
Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Deyong Wu of the Hubei
University for Nationalities in Hubei, China, set out to create
clothing with titanium dioxide coating that can self-clean using
only sunlight. To do this, they doped some TiO2 with nitrogen,
which had been previously shown to wor