GOALI: Water-Based Assembly of Functional Nanomaterial Coatings for Smart Textiles

Smart textiles are textile structures or fabrics with functional coatings that can facilitate human-environment interactions and protect humans and equipment from harmful environments. Smart textiles have a wide range of applications in metaverse, healthcare, sports and fitness, fashion and entertainment, automotive manufacturing, aerospace, and the military.

Manufacturing smart textiles by self-assembly in water faces a fundamental challenge entailed by the very limited choices of polymer textiles and nanomaterials that can bind spontaneously with strength and durability, which severely restricts the applications of smart textiles. This Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) award will support research between investigators at Villanova University and Temple University, partnering with OTEX Specialty Narrow Fabrics Inc, to establish a transformative water-based Salt-Assisted-Assembly process that will unlock the full potential of smart textiles by expanding the design space of viable nanomaterial-textile systems to include a vast range of hydrophobic and hydrophilic materials.

This interdisciplinary research will create a distinctive training platform that integrates academia and industry, enabling students to gain hands-on factory experience while fostering collaboration to address future challenges. The educational goals will be achieved by creating new course modules, offering undergraduate summer internships, and educating K-12 students through activities such as the VU-Library STEM program.

The goal of this project is to establish a transformative Salt-Assisted-Assembly method, to achieve self-assembly at hydrophilic-hydrophobic interfaces and other previously unfeasible systems for manufacturing durable smart textiles. The interdisciplinary team will resolve fundamental challenges in (1) understanding multi-phase interactions in the complex assembly system; (2) understanding particle transport and deposition under dynamic flow and acoustic fields; (3) establishing multiscale modeling to achieve controllable and designable manufacturing; and (4) establishing scalable manufacturing processes with the industrial partner and demonstrating multifunctional smart textiles.

Instead of using destructive surface treatments on particles and polymer textiles to enhance their affinity to each other and wettability with water, this research will investigate and understand the assembly principle altered by adding a low concentration of salt to manipulate the solvent-nanomaterial-polymer substrate interactions, enabling rapid and uniform coating on heterogeneous interfaces. To protect the environment, the salt concentration used in this process will comply with EPA drinking water guidelines.

After the nanoparticles are depleted, the salt will be recycled and reused. Finally, the lab-scale nanomaterial dip-coating process will be transformed into an industrial-level roll-to-roll process with unprecedented high throughput and controllability. This research will significantly expand the design space and applications of smart textiles and other polymer systems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.