Fabric of the Future: Revolutionary Fibers from MIT That “Sense” and React to Cold
Imagine that your jacket “feels” the cold and automatically becomes warmer.
Instead of having a coat for every season, imagine a jacket that dynamically changes shape to become more insulating to keep you warm as temperatures drop.
An interdisciplinary team of researchers at MIT has developed a programmable fiber that could make this idea a reality in the future. Known as FibeRobo, this fiber contracts as temperature rises and automatically returns to its original state as temperature drops, without any built-in sensors or other hard components.
This low-cost fiber is fully compatible with textile production techniques and can be produced continuously for kilometers. This allows designers to easily incorporate actuation and sensing capabilities into a wide range of fabrics for a variety of applications.
The fibers can also be combined with a conductive thread, which acts as a heating element when electric current passes through it. In this way, the fibers are electrically activated, giving the user digital control over the shape of the textile.
Jack Forman, a Tangible Media Group graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, said: “We use textiles for everything. But what should be the most adaptive and responsive – textiles – is completely inert.”
The research will be presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.
Current shape-shifting fibers have disadvantages that largely prevent their integration into textiles outside of laboratory conditions. MIT researchers created fiber , which could be activated silently and change its shape, while being compatible with conventional textile manufacturing procedures. To do this they used a material known as liquid crystal elastomer (LCE).
The result was FibeRobo, a fiber that can contract by 40% without bending, activate at skin-safe temperatures, and cost 20 cents per meter.
MIT researchers used FibeRobo to demonstrate several applications, including an adaptive sports bra that tightens when the user begins to engage in physical activity.
In the future, researchers want to tweak the chemical components of the fiber so it can be recyclable or biodegradable.
2023-10-28 06:40:38
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