While waiting for my latest dress to arrive (it’s a snazzy sky-blue linen number with strategic pleats, in case you wondered) I started daydreaming about a world where people’s bodies might be discretely scanned in 3D and the data uploaded to stores, whereupon clothing designs would be tweaked to fit by experts then sent to home printers to be 3D printed out of recyclable materials and worn almost immediately.  That would combine many of my favorite things in to one giant ball of awesome: instant gratification, rapid prototyping, mass customization, zero transportation cost, and zero production waste.  If you’re thinking, “yeah sure, maybe in the year 3011,” then go ahead and have your little chuckle.  Go on.  Laugh it up.  And now prepare to have your mind BLOWN.

Designer-researchers at Freedom of Creation in Amsterdam and Philip Delamore at the London College of Fashion are currently “cranking out seamless, flexible textile structures using software that converts three-dimensional body data into skin-conforming fabric structures. The potential for bespoke clothing, tailored to the specific individual, are as abundant as the patterns that can be created, from interlocking Mobius motifs to tightly woven meshes” (Chua).  You can see the 3D textiles on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City at the time of this writing.

Images Courtesy www.freedomofcreation.com

The technology uses ultraviolet beams to fuse layers of powdered, recyclable thermoplastic, and the process produces almost no waste. “Its localized production and one-size-fits-all approach also racks up markedly fewer travel miles, requires less labor, and compresses fabrication time to a matter of hours, rather than weeks or months” (Chua).  This technology is going to make a needle and a thread seem quaint, and don’t even mention a thimble or people will laugh derisively, much as you may have been doing before you found out that this technology is REALLY REALLY REAL.

Freedom of Creation also 3D prints objects – furniture, bags, and the like.  I’ve included a few choice photos from their website for your perusal below.

WU XING

I’m filing it under fire because of the melting, and wood because of the plastic.

Cited:

Chua, Jasmin Malik. “Are 3D-printed Fabrics the Future of Sustainable Textiles?” Ecouterre.com 07/29/10. Accessed 08/05/10.  URL.

Yesterday I learned that researchers at MIT have developed functional plastic fibers that can detect and produce sound.  As you can imagine, my coffee cup almost instantly hit the carpet.  After I wiped up the spill, I dug a little deeper to find out what this singing fiber business is all about. 

It seems that the new acoustic fibers are composed of a conducting plastic commonly used in microphones that contains graphite, the same material found in pencil lead and in my leg, from the time when I accidentally stabbed myself with a pencil in my sleep.  (Have I mentioned that I can be a little bit accident-prone?) To make fibers, long strands are drawn from a heated “preform,” (a large cylinder of a single material) and are then cooled. 

The fibers “derive their functionality from the elaborate geometrical arrangement of several different materials, which must survive the heating and drawing process intact.  By playing with the plastic’s fluorine content, the researchers were able to ensure that its molecules remain lopsided — with fluorine atoms lined up on one side and hydrogen atoms on the other — even during heating and drawing.  The asymmetry of the molecules is what makes the plastic “piezoelectric,” meaning that it changes shape when an electric field is applied to it” (Hardesty).  In other words, the composition of the plastic allows it to retain its useful properties throughout the process of forming it into thin strands.

Because the conducting plastic used by the researchers maintains a higher viscosity (stays thick) when heated, it allows the scientists to draw out fibers with uniform thickness.  They then apply an electrical field that is – get this – 20 times as powerful as the fields that cause lightning during storms – to the plastic in order to align all the piezoelectric molecules in the same direction.  If the fibers aren’t uniform, the electric field would generate a tiny lightning bolt!!

Photo: Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT/Greg Hren Photograph

Despite the inherent challenges of the manufacturing process (incidental lightning and so on) the researchers built fibers that you can actually hear when you connect them to a power supply and cause them to vibrate.  As the frequency changes, the fibers emit different sounds (Hardesty).  The fibers are incredibly sensitive to vibration, which means they are capable of responding to changes in their surrounding environment.

The potential applications of these acoustic fibers include wearable microphones and biological sensors, loose nets that monitor the flow of water in the ocean and large-area sonar imaging systems with high resolutions.  Fabric woven from acoustic fibers would provide the equivalent of millions of tiny acoustic sensors, which could be used to create clothes that act as sensitive microphones for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions.  Tiny fiber filaments could measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain (Hardesty).  These fibers are fantastic, and (AHEM) I’d love to get my hands on some!

More information:“Multimaterial piezoelectric fibres.” S. Egusa, Z. Wang, N. Chocat, Z. M. Ruff, A. M. Stolyarov, D. Shemuly, F. Sorin, P. T. Rakich, J. D. Joannopoulos, and Y. Fink. Nature Materials, 11 July 2010.

Provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (news : web).

WU XING:

I’m categorizing these fibers under WOOD because they’re plastic, and FIRE because of the heat and electric field required to make them.

Cited:

Hardesty, Larry. “Fibers that can hear and sing.” Physorg.com. 07/12/10.  Accessed 07/13/10.  URL.

Image courtesy core77

Delight Cloth consists of superthin fiber optic strands woven into a tapestry.  But while Delight Cloth emits light with aplomb, it can’t generate the stuff on its own.  You’ll need to connect a 100W or 150W halogen to one or both ends of the fabric “depending on what effect you want to achieve. You can even add a color controller and get a variety of colors, and yes, the technology can be integrated into clothing (though no word on where you hide the lightbulbs)” (Source: ubergizmo).  The next thing you know we’ll all be wearing glowing jumpsuits and ruffled light dresses like it’s no big thing…. 

Image courtesy core77

WU XING:

Water because the light flows through it and it’s flexible; fire because it glows.

Cited:

“Delight Cloth is a light emitting textile.” Ubergizmo 03/26/10.  Accessed 03/29/10.  URL.

hipstomp. “Transmaterial 3 sheds some light on Delight Cloth.”  Core77 03/24/10. Accessed 03/29/10.  URL.

Image courtesy carolinabees.com

I’m not exactly sure how they managed it, but these industrious researchers “have managed to pull threads of honeybee silkfrom a stew of transgenically-produced silk proteins, meaning cheaper, stronger lightweight textiles and composites with myriad uses could be around the corner” (Dillow).  They physically pulled these threads from the honeybees somehow (I guess they drugged them with smoke first?  I always see people drugging bees with smoke to make them drowsy).  These silk threads are fantastic because they consist of coils that are all coiled up, similar to our family phone cords back in the 1980’s.  If you were to take enough of these coiled coil threads and weave them into textiles, the thought is, you’d be hard pressed to find a more durable bee-produced material.

Image courtesy University of Cambridge Engineering

So it probably takes a long time and is kind of inconvenient to pull silk threads out of honeybees all day, so researchers assembled some recombinant E. coli bacteria (it’s not just for gastric distress anymore!) who stepped up and made artificial construction of the silk thread possible.  The bacteria cells were tweaked to produce the honeybee proteins (of which, you will recall, there are 4) and these, “with a little prodding, self-assembled into the proper structure to mimic honeybee silk” (Dillow).  So now we can make this strong insect silk in mass quantities, because recombinant E. coli doesn’t break for lunch.

This also means I can look forward to featuring honeybee silk textiles, lightweight composites for use in marine construction and in aviation in the coming years!  I’m so excited.  I’m so … scared.

WU XING:

This entry is about protein, essentially, so I put it in the metal category because it just feels tough and durable and kind of ductile like metal – although I am not sure yet if this silk is any of these things.  What do you think about that?

Cited:

Atkins, William.  “Artificial Silk Could be the Bee’s Knees.”  iTWire.com 02/03/10.  Accessed 02/02/10.  URL.

Dillow, Clay. “Tough, Lightweight Honeybee Silk Could Revolutionize Textiles, Composites.”  Popsci.com 02/03/10.  Accessed 02/03/10.  URL.