The latest development in textiles and fibers is a kind of soft hardware that you can wear: cloth that has electronic devices built right into it.<\/p>\n
Researchers at MIT have now embedded high speed optoelectronic semiconductor devices, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and diode photodetectors, within fibers that were then woven at Inman Mills, in South Carolina, into soft, washable fabrics and made into communication systems. This marks the achievement of a long-sought goal of creating \u201csmart\u201d fabrics by incorporating semiconductor devices \u2014 the key ingredient of modern electronics \u2014 which until now was the missing piece for making fabrics with sophisticated functionality.<\/p>\n
This discovery, the researchers \u00a0say, could unleash a new \u201cMoore\u2019s Law\u201d for fibers \u2014 in other words, a rapid progression in which the capabilities of fibers would grow rapidly and exponentially over time, just as the capabilities of microchips have grown over decades.<\/p>\n
The findings are described this week in the journal\u00a0Nature<\/em>\u00a0in a paper by former MIT graduate student Michael Rein; his research advisor Yoel Fink, MIT professor of materials science and electrical engineering and CEO of AFFOA (Advanced Functional Fabrics of America); along with a team from MIT, AFFOA, Inman Mills, EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Lincoln Laboratory.<\/p>\n Optical fibers have been traditionally produced by making a cylindrical object called a \u201cpreform,\u201d which is essentially a scaled-up model of the fiber, then heating it. Softened material is then drawn or pulled downward under tension and the resulting fiber is collected on a spool.<\/p>\n The key breakthrough for producing\u00a0 these new fibers was to add to the preform light-emitting semiconductor diodes the size of a grain of sand, and a pair of copper wires a fraction of a hair\u2019s width. When heated in a furnace during the fiber-drawing process, the polymer preform partially liquified, forming a long fiber with the diodes lined up along its center and connected by the copper wires.<\/p>\n In this case, the solid components were two types of electrical diodes made using standard microchip technology: light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and photosensing diodes. \u201cBoth the devices and the wires maintain their dimensions while everything shrinks around them\u201d in the drawing process, Rein says. The resulting fibers were then woven into fabrics, which were laundered 10 times to demonstrate their practicality as possible material for clothing.<\/p>\n \u201cThis approach adds a new insight into the process of making fibers,\u201d says Rein, who was the paper\u2019s lead author and developed the concept that led to the new process. \u201cInstead of drawing the material all together in a liquid state, we mixed in devices in particulate form, together with thin metal wires.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the advantages of incorporating function into the fiber material itself is that the resulting \u00a0fiber is inherently waterproof. To demonstrate this, the team placed some of the photodetecting fibers inside a fish tank. A lamp outside the aquarium transmitted music (appropriately, Handel\u2019s \u201cWater Music\u201d) through the water to the fibers in the form of rapid optical signals. The fibers in the tank converted the light pulses \u2014 so rapid that the light appears steady to the naked eye \u2014 to electrical signals, which were then converted into music. The fibers survived in the water for weeks.<\/p>\n Though the principle sounds simple, making it work consistently, and making sure that the fibers could be manufactured reliably and in quantity, has been a long and difficult process. Staff at the Advanced Functional Fabric of America Institute, led by Jason Cox and Chia-Chun Chung, developed the pathways to increasing yield, throughput, and overall reliability, making these fibers ready for transitioning to industry. At the same time, Marty Ellis from Inman Mills developed techniques for weaving these fibers into fabrics using a conventional industrial manufacturing-scale loom.<\/p>\n \u201cThis paper describes a scalable path for incorporating semiconductor devices into fibers. We are anticipating the emergence of a \u2018Moore\u2019s law\u2019 analog in fibers in the years ahead,\u201d Fink says. \u201cIt is already allowing us to expand the fundamental capabilities of fabrics to encompass communications, lighting, physiological monitoring, and more. In the years ahead fabrics will deliver value-added services and will no longer just be selected for aesthetics and comfort.\u201d<\/p>\n He says that the first commercial products incorporating this technology will be reaching the marketplace as early as next year \u2014 an extraordinarily short progression from laboratory research to commercialization. Such rapid lab-to-market development was a key part of the reason for creating an academic-industry-government collaborative such as AFFOA in the first place, he says. These initial applications will be specialized products involving communications and safety. \u201cIt’s going to be the first fabric communication system. We are right now in the process of transitioning the technology to domestic manufacturers and industry at an unprecendented speed and scale,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n In addition to commercial applications, Fink says the U.S. Department of Defense \u2014 one of AFFOA\u2019s major supporters \u2014 \u201cis exploring applications of these ideas to our women and men in uniform.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond communications, the fibers could potentially have significant applications in the biomedical field, the researchers say. For example, devices using such fibers might be used to make a wristband that could measure pulse or blood oxygen levels, or be woven into a bandage to continuously monitor the healing\u00a0 process.<\/p>\n The research was supported in part by the MIT Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) through the MRSEC Program of the National Science Foundation, by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. This work was also supported by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.<\/p>\n MIT News<\/a><\/p>\n The latest development in textiles and fibers is a kind of soft hardware that you can wear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":340957,"featured_media":271613,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31750],"tags":[887,35,7699],"class_list":["post-271611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","tag-fibre-1","tag-headline","tag-mit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271611"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/340957"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271611"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":271615,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271611\/revisions\/271615"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Now read:\u00a0Ericsson to start production in the United States<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"