Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Shape-shifting fiber can produce morphing fabrics”.
[, MUSIC PLAYING ] JACK FORMAN. So if you’re, a person who wears clothing, you’ve probably had experience of a reconfigurable or morphing textile.. Unfortunately, this is generally the case. If you put your sweater in the dryer and it comes out two sizes too small and you can’t wear it anymore., What we’re doing here is we’re taking the same idea of what happens when a textile can change shape, but trying to see if we can find New utility in it., And so what we’ve developed here is a reconfigurable fiber..
So this is a fiber that shrinks when heated, but when you cool it down, it reverses back to the original length.. The ability to use heat, as our input allows us to do very discreet, low-profile fabrics that look and feel like a normal fabric, but are capable of dynamically changing their shape, but doing so silently., And so what we developed is this machine that can extrude this thick Resin material, almost like a notch in a hot glue, gun., There’s, then UV lights that cure the fiber to fully solidify the fiber dipped in oil and then collected at the top of the spool.. A lot of this work was getting to the point where we could produce large amounts of fiber..
You need massive amounts of fiber to be able to make things that are meaningful to our day-to-day life.. So now that we have an approach that allows me to produce a kilometer of fiber in a day, we can then now start to think about tapping into then the full wealth of resources that the millennia-old craft of textiles provides to us. .
