For my final line-up I would love to use some smart fabrics and after having a look around I found a lot that I think would be great to use.
Temperature sensitive fabrics Clothings main job is to keep up warm or cool so it makes sense that the smart material industry is looking into making fabrics that can regulate body temperature. These types of fabrics are mostly seen in windbreakers and beanies. Junor Campbell design and development manager for Mountain Designs says its hats, beanies and jackets are often treated with paraffins.“Paraffin changes its character. As you get hot it becomes more liquid and all that heat to pass out,” says Campbell. “As the body gets cold it solidifies and keeps heat back with the wearer.” Other fabrics that are also starting to appear are ones that conduct electricity to monitor your body temperature but because they are still so new they are very expensive but one company that wants to launch in this market with a more reasonable price range, Australian Wool Innovators, want to make socks that will be able to keep your toes toastie at 30 degrees centigrade but also feel like any other sock and being washable.
Odour Eaters There are also fabrics that are being developed that are suited for more health reasons, fabrics with anti-bacterial treatments. Materials that are treated with silver seem to be working best and the garment that seems to be best for this type of fabric is underwear, you can treat underwear with anti-bacterial but it washed out but they have found that if it has silver added to it, the same effect happens but it is permanent. Microencapsulation technology, which allows a whole swathe of substances including aloe vera, vitamins or insect repellents to be added to the fabric, is creating endless possibilities.
Medical Material Microencapsulated fabrics is best for medical treatments, mainly in the natural health sector. Materials with vitamin E are great for scarring and theres also a good market in materials for diabetes and improving circulation. There has been development in smart fabrics called bio-therapeutic textiles where they look to isolating the chemical properties of gold fly maggots that are known to combat wound infection, this could be extremely useful when it comes to dressings and bandages. For electrically conductive smart fabrics there is a much greater medical use, for example, in hospitals they could be used to create life vests that would monitor your heart rate, ECG and body temperature and you could have every patient wearing one with the results all going back to the nurses in a central office to be monitored. Though it would be a very long time until this could be seen as a reality because this type of technology is still extremely expensive.
Cuts, scrapes, blisters, burns, splinters, and punctures — there are a number of ways our skin can be broken. Most treatments for skin wounds involve simply covering them with a barrier (usually an adhesive gauze bandage) to keep them moist, limit pain, and reduce exposure to infectious microbes, but they do not actively assist in the healing process.
More sophisticated wound dressings that can monitor aspects of healing such as pH and temperature and deliver therapies to a wound site have been developed in recent years, but they are complex to manufacture, expensive, and difficult to customize, limiting their potential for widespread use.
Now, a new, scalable approach to speeding up wound healing has been developed based on heat-responsive hydrogels that are mechanically active, stretchy, tough, highly adhesive, and antimicrobial: active adhesive dressings (AADs). Created by researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, the Harvard John A. Paulson School for Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and McGill University, AADs can close wounds significantly faster than other methods and prevent bacterial growth without the need for any additional apparatus or stimuli. The research is reported in Science Advances.
Imagine windows that can easily transform into mirrors, or super high-speed computers that run not on electrons but light. These are just some of the potential applications that could one day emerge from optical engineering, the practice of using lasers to rapidly and temporarily change the properties of materials.
“These tools could let you transform the electronic properties of materials at the flick of a light switch,” says Caltech Professor of Physics David Hsieh. “But the technologies have been limited by the problem of the lasers creating too much heat in the materials.”
In a new study in Nature, Hsieh and his team, including lead author and graduate student Junyi Shan, report success at using lasers to dramatically sculpt the properties of materials without the production of any excess damaging heat.
“The lasers required for these experiments are very powerful so it’s hard to not heat up and damage the materials,” says Shan. “On the one hand, we want the material to be subjected to very intense laser light. On the other hand, we don’t want the material to absorb any of that light at all.” To get around this the team found a “sweet spot,” Shan says, where the frequency of the laser is fine-tuned in such a way to markedly change the material’s properties without imparting any unwanted heat.
The genetic code of squid ring teeth holds the key to a multiphase polymer that self-heals by simply adding water, leading to potential innovation from medical implants to deep-sea installations.
The copolymer developed by a Pennsylvania State University, USA, research team features an amorphous segment around a molecular architecture consisting of amino acids connected by hydrogen bonds, forming a pleated sheet. While the sheet gives the polymer strength, the amorphous segment is derived from the squid ring teeth proteins that lends the polymer its regenerative qualities.
NOM
Observing the ubiquitous self-healing qualities of squid ring teeth proteins across the world, the research team began to work to develop a polymer that would benefit from this property. Noting that the ‘yield of this proteinaceous material from natural sources is low (about 1g of squid ring teeth protein from 5kg of squid), the Penn State researchers created artificial proteins in bacteria.
A sample can created and cut in half, before being submerged in water, where the two halves reformed into the original sample shape. Subsequent strength testing indicated that the sample was as strong as when originally created.
This writer would like to confirm that searching for images of squid teeth was a deeply unpleasant experience
Melik Demirel, Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Penn State, commented, ‘What’s unique about this plastic is the ability to stick itself back together with a drop of water. Maybe someday we could apply this approach to healing of wounds or other applications. It would be interesting in the long run to see if we could promote wound healing this way, so that is where I’m going to focus now.’
Researchers from the Univ. of Bristol have shown it is possible to create artificial skin that can be transformed at the flick of a switch to mimic one of nature’s masters of camouflage, the squid. The research team has designed a smart materials system, inspired by biological chromatophores, which creates patterns that change and morph over time and mimic biological patterning.
Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The Univ. of Texas at Austin are one step closer to delivering smart windows with a new level of energy efficiency, engineering materials that allow windows to reveal light without transferring heat and, conversely, to block light while allowing heat transmission, as described in two new research papers.
Plastic with a thousand faces: A single piece of Nafion foil makes it possible to produce a broad palette of complex 3D structures. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, researchers describe how they use simple chemical “programming” to induce the foil to fold itself using origami and kirigami principles. These folds can be repeatedly “erased” and the foil can be “reprogrammed”.
We have all seen the cranes and lotus flowers produced from a sheet of paper by practiced hands. Origami is the traditional Japanese art of folding that transforms paper into complex three-dimensional structures without the use of adhesive. Kirigami is a related technique in which the paper is strategically cut before folding. Both of these techniques have found application in modern technology.
Adebola Oyefusi and Jian Chen from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee (USA) have now presented a new variation on this technique. They chemically “programmed” Nafion foil so that heat causes it to fold itself into complex three-dimensional forms. The foil can also be “deprogrammed”. Nafion is a polymer that can “remember” its shape, so that a stretched piece of foil will return to its initial form upon heating.
French-born and British-based, Marlene Huissoud developed the project “From Insects : an exploration of insect materials from the common honeybee and the Indian silkworm”. This collection of vessels from insect byproducts such as propolis was made by using a variety of glass techniques, including venetian artistry, glass blowing and engraving.
Harvard researchers have designed a new type of foldable material that is versatile, tunable and self actuated. It can change size, volume and shape; it can fold flat to withstand the weight of an elephant without breaking, and pop right back up to prepare for the next task.
Smart Materials company MatX is introducing an innovative anti-microbial filament with unique properties. Let’s have a quick look at AMBX PLA, learn about the company, and see what other products and innovations they are working on.
