4/24/2023 0 Comments Raindrops drawing![]() It is heated and pulled like taffy to produce a fiber the same size as a conventional yarn in fabric. The team carefully constructed the preform to contain more than 50 alternating layers of acrylic and polycarbonate. The fiber starts as a block of a polymer called a preform. Nobody would be able to tell that they’re there until they had an infrared detector.” They would make up less than a few percent of the fabric. Perkins says, “Unlike the eye-catching designs of butterfly wings, the fibers are not meant to be showy. In this case, you’d want reflections at wavelengths that stand out from the optical signatures of the other materials in your fabric, which tend to be dark because common fabric materials absorb infrared radiation. By layering certain materials, you can design this mirror to reflect specific wavelengths. Therefore further thinning while maintaining reflectivity at the required wavelengths is an ongoing field of research.ĭFDC researcher Bradford Perkins, a study co-author, said, “It’s a fiber that acts like a perfect mirror. The fibers generated in this study are still significantly thicker than garment fibers. He is evaluating marketing alternatives after the team applied for patent protection for their technology. His work in U-Michigan’s Shtein Lab focuses on applying photonics to fiber-based devices, such as a structural-color fiber developed at MIT by Professor Yoel Fink. We want to find ways to identify materials for another use after the life cycle of the garment.”Įrin Doran, a textile specialist at Lincoln Laboratory’s Defense Fabric Development Center (DFDC), is working with researchers in the Advanced Materials and Microsystems Group to create “future fabrics” by merging fibers with tiny electronics and sensors.īrian Iezzi, the study’s lead author, is investigating ways to improve textile recyclability. To identify a product, the fiber acts like an optical barcode, and having a way to quickly identify fabric types and sort them as they come through could help recycling systems scale up.Įrin Doran, a co-author of the team’s study, said, “Having a way to easily identify fabric types and sort them as they’re coming through could help make recycling processes scale up. This fiber is only reflective under specific infrared light wavelengths, allowing recyclers to determine the type of cloth the fiber represents. More modern approaches that study a garment’s chemistry need to be revised to identify components in fabric mixes, which comprise the majority of clothes.Ī team from MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the University of Michigan offers an innovative technique to label fabrics to improve this sorting process: weaving fibers with designed reflectivity. Hand sorting is time-consuming and challenging due to worn-out or missing labels. Those cannot be resold as they are being shipped to facilities where they are categorized by fabric type. Recycling textiles is only sometimes simple. Massachusetts was the first state to pass laws banning the dumping of textiles in the garbage in 2022 from increasing recycling rates. This waste, which represents 85% of the fabrics made in a given year, is a significant environmental issue. An estimated 15 million tonnes of textiles are burned or end up in landfills each year in the US.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |