HCC Core: Small: Catalyzing Sustainable Smart Textiles Innovation Through Desktop Fiber Spinning

Smart textiles, fabrics with electronic or responsive material embedded into their structures, are highly useful for applications in soft robotics, medical monitoring, aerospace, and architecture, with a forecasted market of USD $15 billion by 2030. This project tackles the sustainability concerns that this growth poses because smart textiles will combine two of the world's largest waste-streams: textile waste and electronic waste.

Prior research has revealed the potential of working with biomaterials—materials derived from or produced by biological organisms—to create custom sustainable materials that can also conduct electricity, change shape, dissolve, and readily biodegrade. This project will create a pathway for integrating biologically-inspired design (biodesign) into smart textiles research with the goal of addressing sustainability challenges in the smart textiles landscape.

Specifically, the research team will study the potential for sustainable innovation that emerges when biomaterials can be spun into fibers—the backbone of all textiles—with custom properties such as crimp, cross-sectional shape, and length. By unlocking fiber-level design with biomaterials, this project seeks to enable smart textile innovators to fine-tune materials for performance while foregrounding sustainability considerations such as material recyclability and compostability.

This project will foster sustainable smart textiles innovation by iteratively designing and studying a desktop system for spinning biofibers, fibers made from biomaterials. The iterative design and evaluation of this fabrication pipeline, alongside collaboration with smart textiles innovators (artists-in-residence, community members, students, and subject-matter experts) will generate insights into biofiber design and uncover new applications in the domain of sustainable smart textiles.

To further illustrate the potential impact that the research team envisions from biofibers, this project will also examine the challenge of generating sustainable textile alternatives to single-use electronics. The research outcomes will include an open-source system (hardware and software) for biofiber production; a set of resources for producing sustainable single-use smart textiles; and a set of design strategies for supporting smart textiles innovators as they venture into this underexplored design space.

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.