The first boards for gliding over snow existed as early as 1900, but it was not until 1963 that American surfers brought the feeling of surfing to the snow and developed the original snowboard—the so-called snurfer. A few years later, the snowboard drew the interest of the winter sports industry, and since 1998, snowboarding has been recognized as an Olympic sport.
Chemnitz University of Technology researchers have presented an innovation from the 2020/2021 winter sports season: Together with silbaerg GmbH, a spin-off from the Institute of Lightweight Structures at Chemnitz University of Technology, they have developed a lightweight snowboard that can also be manufactured far more sustainably than comparable boards. This is made possible by a new type of textile fiber, a semi-finished product made of carbon fibers. By using the dry fiber placement process, fiber waste in snowboard production can be reduced by around 60%. “This not only saves costs, but thanks to the board’s sustainable production, its carbon footprint is also significantly reduced,” says Prof. Dr. Holger Cebulla, head of the Chair of Textile Technologies.
New research from engineers at MIT shows that reconstituted silk can be several times stronger than the natural fiber and made in different forms.
When it comes to concocting the complex mix of molecules that makes up fibers of natural silk, nature beats human engineering hands down. Despite efforts to synthesize the material, artificial varieties still cannot match the natural fiber’s strength.
But by starting with silk produced by silkworms, breaking it down chemically, and then reassembling it, engineers have found they can make a material that is more than twice as stiff as its natural counterpart and can be shaped into complex structures such as meshes and lattices.
The new material is dubbed regenerated silk fiber (RSF) and could find a host of applications in commercial and biomedical settings, the researchers say. The findings are reported in the journal Nature Communications, in a paper by McAfee Professor of Engineering Markus Buehler, postdoc Shengjie Ling, research scientist Zhao Qin, and three others at Tufts University.
The complex architecture of bone is challenging to recreate in the lab. Therefore, advances in bone tissue engineering (BTE) aim to build patient-specific grafts that assist bone repair and trigger specific cell-signaling pathways. Materials scientists in regenerative medicine and BTE progressively develop new materials for active biological repair at a site of defect post-implantation to accelerate healing through bone biomimicry.
Rapidly initiation of new bone formation at the site of implantation is a highly desirable feature in BTE, and scientists are focused on fabricating grafts that strengthen the material-bone interface after implantation. Bioactive glass can bond with bone minutes after grafting, and silk fibroin, a natural fibrous protein has potential to induce bone regeneration. Hybrid materials that exploit these properties can combine the osteogenic potential and the load-bearing capacity for potential applications in large-load bone defect models.
In a recent study, Swati Midha and co-workers developed a novel 3-D hybrid construct using silk-based inks with different bioactive glass compositions integrated to recreate a bone-mimetic microenvironment that supports osteogenic differentiation of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cell (BMSC) lines in the lab. Now published in Biomedical Materials, IOP Science, the scientists used direct writing instruments to produce the silk fibroin-gelatin-bioactive glass scaffolds (SF-G-BG). The results delivered appropriate cues to regulate the development of customized 3-D human bone constructs in vitro.
A green method for producing crystalline supramolecular fibers promises to make polymer production more sustainable.
A polymer that catalyzes its own formation in an environmentally friendly solvent-free process has been developed by an all-RIKEN team of chemists. The discovery could lead to the development of inherently recyclable polymer materials that are made using a sustainable process.
Polymers are ubiquitous today, but they are detrimental to the environment through the accumulation of plastic waste and the unsustainable nature of conventional polymer manufacture. Polymers are generally made by linking together strings of building blocks, known as monomers, using covalent bonds. But these strong bonds make it difficult to take used, end-of-life plastic items and de-polymerize them to recover the monomers for reuse.
The all-white clothes range for Wimbledon, designed by Stella McCartney, is also going green by using recycled materials.
In this new range of tennis-wear Adidas and McCartney are taking steps towards sustainability by creating the clothes out of recycled polyester, a synthetic fibre created using waste materials like plastic bottles and previously used clothing items that have been cleaned and processed again to turn them into new fibres ready for a new purpose.
As well as using recycled polyester, the collection is also made by using parley ocean plastic, which is a material developed from upcycled plastic waste which was picked up and hindered from entering the oceans at beaches and coastal areas before being turned into yarn, according to a press release.
Not only is the clothes made from recycled materials, with a better environmental footprint, but the technology used to create the range – dope dye technology – is also greening the line. The method wastes less water by incorporating colour directly into the material mix at the beginning stage in the production process.
‘Therefore, when the fibre is formed, it is already the desired colour and as a result, reduces wastewater by at least 10 litres per garment,’ the release stated.
The range, sold by Adidas, is available to purchase online now and the range can be seen on Wimbledon players such as Angelique Kerber, Caroline Wozniacki and Alexander Zverev.
Composite materials are increasingly popular. One of the primary composite materials for modern structures is glass fiber reinforced plastic (GFRP), which is commonly used in aviation, modern transport and wind power plants. Scientists of South Ural State University have carried out extensive studies of ballistic properties of GFRP to improve the efficiency of its use.
GFRP is relatively cheap and has high strength. However, practically all well-known results regarding ballistic characteristics of GFRP do not take into account various loads occurring when operating the structures or consider comparatively low-impact loading speeds. At the same time, a more frequently encountered problem is impacts at high speed. The team of scientists from SUSU’s Institute of Engineering and Technology have determined ballistic characteristics of glass fiber reinforced plastic under exposure to operational loads at a high speed of impact loading.
“Often, noses of modern trains, which are produced out of composite materials, are exposed to impacts during the train’s movement. We have studied the influence of the impact force on a plate made of composite material under the normal operational load. We stretched the sample, creating a strained condition, and then determined its ballistic properties in an impact,” says one of the project authors, Mikhail Zhikharev.
A University of Alberta researcher has found a new use for a canola byproduct, providing potential for diverse markets beyond China.
Canolastraw—the fibrous stalk left in the field after the plant is harvested for its oil—is proving useful in strengthening a plant-based cling wrap developed by Marleny Saldaña, a researcher in food and bioengineering processing.
In a new study, Saldaña and her research team used cellulose nanofibres from canolastraw to make the clear, plastic-like film, which is 12 times stronger than what they’ve already developed from cassava starch. The straw, which has little other use except as bedding for soil nutrients, contains cellulose and lignin, two components that support the canola plant.
Using canola straw this way demonstrates potential value-added options for the crop residue besides obtaining oil and protein from its seed, said Saldaña, who believes her and her team’s discovery to be the first application of its kind.
Introducing a simple step to the production of plant-derived, biodegradable plastic could improve its properties while overcoming obstacles to manufacturing it commercially, says new research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Jiangnan University.
That step? Bringing the heat
Nebraska’s Yiqi Yang and colleagues found that raising the temperature of bio-plastic fibers to several hundred degrees Fahrenheit, then slowly allowing them to cool, greatly improved the bio-plastic’s normally lackluster resistance to heat and moisture.
Its thermal approach also allowed the team to bypass solvents and other expensive, time-consuming techniques typically needed to manufacture a commercially viable bio-plastic, the study reported.
Yang said the approach could allow manufacturers of corn-derived plastic – such as a Cargill plant in Blair, Nebraska – to continuously produce the biodegradable material on a scale that at least approaches petroleum-based plastic, the industry standard. Recent research estimates that about 90 percent of U.S. plastic goes unrecycled.
SEM imaging of our newly electrospun nanofibre composites. Fibre diameters from Sample 3 (images 2 and 4 here) have projected diameters of 40 - 100 nm, which are excellent results for this stage in the research.
The other images just look really, really cool, so I thought I’d share them as well!
For most people, thinking of a favorite sweater likely brings to mind descriptors like soft and cozy, warm but breathable. Maybe it’s made of a fine Merino wool or cashmere. Few are those who, when thinking of the sartorial pleasures of knitted clothing made of natural fibers, will conjure the effluvia of slaughterhouses.
Philipp Stössel is one of the few. Stössel, a doctoral student researching biomaterials science, looks for useful materials that can be made from agricultural waste. Working with colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, he has been perfecting a process to make warm yarns out of animal byproducts like gelatin that can be knitted into clothing.
The motivation to turn the skin, bones and tendons of vertebrates into a wearable fiber comes, the group writes, from an enormous supply of waste.
“The raw material, namely, slaughterhouse waste, accumulates at about 10 million tons per year in the European Union and the global gelatin market is expected to reach 450,000 tons in 2018,” Stössel and his coauthors wrote recently in a study published in the journal Biomacromolecules. Learn more and see pictures of the process below.
A Cornell University lab is applying nanotechnology to make textiles do a whole range of new and useful tricks.
Chemical and biomolecular engineer Juan Hinestroza and his team in the textiles nanotechnology lab are adding tiny bits of metal into fibrous material like cotton. When woven into a textile, the augmented yarn can produce light, kill disease-causing microbes or act as a filter to trap harmful gas. In addition, the metal oxides allow the yarn to be fashioned into conductive components like transistors for electronics.
“We want to transform traditional natural fibers into true engineering materials that are multifunctional and that can be customized to any demand,” Hinestroza said. “We are chemists, we are material scientists, we are designers, we want to create materials that will perform many functions, yet remain as flexible and as comfortable as a t-shirt or an old pair of jeans.”
Domesticated chickens in the United States alone produce more than 2 billion pounds of feathers annually. Those feathers have long been considered a waste product, especially when contaminated with blood, feces or bacteria that can prove hazardous to the environment.
Nebraska’s Yiqi Yang is among a growing cadre of researchers looking to transform those feathers into fibers that find a place in natural fabrics. In that vein, Yang and his Husker colleagues are devising and testing methods to improve the properties of feather-derived fibers.
Those methods include cross-linking: chemically bonding long protein chains—including keratin, a water-resistant protein of feathers—to bolster the performance of the resulting fibers and fabrics. But that performance must still improve, and unwanted side effects of cross-linking be resolved, before feathers emerge as a greener alternative to petroleum-based materials—polyester, nylon—currently dominating the market.
For the first time, patented titanium fiber plates developed by Japanese engineers for medical use have been tested in an animal model. Researchers from Shinshu University found that, unlike conventional plates, titanium fiber plates do not cause bone embrittlement after close contact with the bone for prolonged periods. This could eliminate the need for plate extraction and the associated surgical risks.
“Ourtitanium fiber plates, unlike conventional titanium plates, are prepared by compressing titanium fibers at normal room temperature into plates without changing the fiber shape,” said Takashi Takizawa, M.D., the paper’s first author from the department of orthopaedic surgery at the Shinshu University School of Medicine. “They can compensate for the major drawback of conventional titanium plates, and find application in a range of fixation and bone tissue repair uses at various sites of the body.”
Their results were published in the January 25th online issue of the journal Advanced Materials.
Most commonly used to hold bones in place while they heal, titanium plates are erosion resistant and strong enough to hold the mending bones in place. Doctors may elect to implant a titanium plate in a patient with a bad fracture, a severe skull injury, or a degenerative bone disease.
For the first time, researchers have fabricated sensing elements known as fiber Bragg gratings inside optical fibers designed to dissolve completely inside the body. The bioresorbable fiber Bragg gratings could be used for in-body monitoring of bone fracture healing and for safer exploration of sensitive organs such as the brain.
A fiber Bragg grating is an optical element inscribed in an optical fiber, which is widely used as a sensing instrument. Although fiber Bragg gratings are commonly used for applications such as real-time monitoring of the structural health of bridges or tracking the integrity of airplane wings, until now they didn’t exhibit characteristics preferred for use in the body. With a design that allows them to break down similarly to dissolvable stitches, the new glass fibers should be safe for patients even if they accidently break, according to the researchers.
“Our work paves the way toward optical fiber sensors that can be safely inserted into the human body,” said Maria Konstantaki, a member of the research team from the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser (IESL) of the Foundation of Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH), Greece, that fabricated and characterized the new gratings. “Because they dissolve, these sensors don’t need to be removed after use and would enable new ways to perform efficient treatments and diagnoses in the body.”
New research has demonstrated how the nano-architecture of a silkworm’s fiber causes “Anderson localization of light,” a discovery that could lead to various innovations and a better understanding of light transport and heat transfer.
The discovery also could help create synthetic materials and structures that realize the phenomenon, named after Nobel laureate Philip Anderson, whose theory describes how electrons can be brought to a complete halt in materials due to their “scattering and defects.” The new findings relate not to electrons, but to light transport.
Researchers demonstrated how the nano-architecture of the silk fibers is capable of light “confinement,” a trait that could provide a range of technological applications including innovations that harness light for new types of medical therapies and biosensing. This light-confinement effect in biological and natural tissue, which was unexpected, is made possible by the Anderson localization of light, said Young Kim, an associate professor in Purdue University’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering.
The new findings suggest silk fibers may represent “natural metamaterials” and “natural metastructures,” Kim said.
Over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, nature has produced a myriad of biological materials that serve either as skeletons or as defensive or offensive weapons. Although these natural structural materials are derived from relatively sterile natural components, such as fragile minerals and ductile biopolymers, they often exhibit extraordinary mechanical properties due to their highly ordered hierarchical structures and sophisticated interfacial design. Therefore, they are always a research subject for scientists aiming to create advanced artificial structural materials.
Through microstructural observation, researchers have determined that many biological materials, including fish scales, crab claws and bone, all have a characteristic “twisted plywood” structure that consists of a highly ordered arrangement of micro/nanoscale fiber lamellas. They are structurally sophisticated natural fiber-reinforced composites and often exhibit excellent damage tolerance that is desirable for engineering structural materials, but difficult to obtain. Therefore, researchers are seeking to mimic this kind of natural hierarchical structure and interfacial design by using artificial synthetic and abundant one-dimensional micro/nanoscale fibers as building blocks. In this way, they hope to produce high-performance artificial structural materials superior to existing materials. However, due to the lack of micro/nanoscale assembly technology, especially the lack of means to efficiently integrate one-dimensional micro/nanoscale structural units into macroscopic bulk form, mimicking natural fiber-reinforced composites has always been a major challenge.
These tiny interwoven fibers make up the 3-D fabric “scaffold” into which a strong, pliable hydrogel is integrated and infiltrated with stem cells, forming a framework for growingcartilage. The resulting composite material is tough, flexible and formable and has excellent frictional properties. It mimics both the strength and suppleness of native cartilage.
Visit Website | Image credit: Frank Moutos, Orthopaedic Research Laboratories, Duke University, and Farshid Guilak, Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Duke University
Final pt IV in this new series | secondhand and vintage fibers (mostly cotton and wool) on a neutral cotton warp | exploring architecture, color, and geometry
process: sourcing yarn from unraveled secondhand sweaters (cotton and wool), embroidery and found materials (protective mesh for produce) on bubble wrap
