Spinning smarter fibres by throwing silk into the mix

Silk fibres are often held up as the pinnacle of natural materials due to their highly desirable properties that often outperform their synthetic counterparts. However whilst mulberry silk, the source of all our commercial textile silk, has been shaped over 5000-years of farming to be the ideal fibre for clothing, we believe we can take it one step further and make silk "smart".

Others have approached this by simply dipping fabric into a range of different chemicals and coating it, however anyone who has seen their favourite clothes fade and fray in the wash knows this isn't sustainable or the best solution. The PhD challenge is how to incorporate functional additives into silk before it is spun.

This isn't as straightforward as it seems, whilst perfectly possible with other synthetic fibres to mix in additives, silk has some really interesting optimisations that means it is exquisitely sensitive to flow. This means that attempts to incorporate additives may prematurely solidify the unspun silk prior to spinning. Therefore we need to look at how to make silk even smarter, by turning on and off its flow sensitivity in order to mix in the additives and then to reactivate it and spin it into fibres.

Based on our recent publications this should be possible through controlling the chemical environment of the silk via balancing salt concentrations, acidity and some other biological tricks. However to achieve this we need to first understand it, and this will involve using state of the art techniques that can measure and visualise flow in complex systems and then you'll put that knowledge into practice through our industry sponsor Spintex Engineering Ltd.

Furthermore added value to the PhD comes from our industrial partner who is keen that this project is truly collaborative. As Spintex Engineering Ltd is SME, the contributions you can make across the business are significant and will give you first hand exposure to product development in an entrepreneurial environment.