On Sunday night when I was having a movie night with my family, I was watching the movie Mission Mangal first time after it releases, which is an inspirational story of a group of scientists who work relentlessly to make the Mars Orbiter Mission successful.
Here I saw that that they constructed the spacecraft from a fabric that has the ability to self repair automatically inspite of high temperature of the Sun in the Solar System. From there, I got curious to know more about this kind of fabrics, how they are prepared, how fabrics are turned into sensors and what is the science behind such a technology. There is a whole array of possibilities related to material innovation, smart and sustainable textiles, and the latest processing technologies for the fashion technology. So let’s explore about such type of technology:
What exactly are smart fabrics or smart textiles?
To understand this term in a simplest way, we define it as textile that has been developed with new technologies that provide added value to the wear, that can sense and react to environmental conditions or stimuli from mechanical, thermal, chemical, electrical or magnetic properties.
Just imagine how wonderful is it to charge your phone from your T-Shirt or a textile which can create energy! Or telling your outfit that you are feeling too hot or cold…and then they responds by cooling or heating itself automatically. These are all within the realm of possibility with the development of Smart Fabrics. 21^st^ century is the period of technological revolution and with the smart textile innovations many value additions can be made to a normal piece of textile material. There is a huge buzz around the business of smart fabric products.
Smart textiles are also known as electronic textiles or e-textiles. Their main motive is basically to provide added value to the user, whether for pleasure, performance, safety, security or lifestyle monitoring.
Classification of Smart Textile
There are various classifications available theoretically however the two main broad categories are: aesthetics and performance enhancement.
1. Aesthetic Smart Textiles
These are the textiles that use the technology mainly for the fashion and entertainment purposes, these smart textiles incorporate unique aesthetics into their creation from changing colors to communicating with wearable devices through clothing. Even in the mega events across worldwide like the New York Fashion Week, models controlled what their dresses looked like on the red carpet through their mobile phones!
2. Performance Enhancing Textiles
As the name suggests itself, these textiles enhance the performance by regulating body temperature, reducing wind resistance, monitoring heart rate, breath rate and by controlling muscle vibrations. The advent of this revolution provided a great boost to the athletics, sports, military industries and healthcare sectors.
Application of Smart Textiles
Health
There are wireless-enabled garment with embedded textile sensors that allow physiological signals to be continuously monitored during normal daily life activities. These wearable sensitized garments can continuously monitor ECG, human heart rhythm and respiration, and other physical activities. There are smart socks, smart baby jumpsuits and other similar smart clothing used for medical purposes.
Fashion and entertainment
Because of the recent advancements in fashion technology and wearable gadgets, smart clothing, wearable spaces, multi-functional designs and responsive sportswear has seen significant development in recent years.
While technology may be hidden through invisible coatings and advanced fibres, these can be used to dramatically change the appearance of the textile by emitting light or processing light, giving new and dazzling effects. In short, it can make you a Chameleon!
Military
There is always a need for real time information technology to increase the survivability and protection of the people working in extreme environmental conditions and hazardous situations and such requirements can be fulfilled by these smart textiles. Beside this, these are also used for military camouflage. Thus, these smart textiles can be used to increase the safety and effectiveness of military forces.
Life jacket and life belt
Life jacket is an intelligent medical device that reads the blood pressure or monitors the heart rate of the patients wearing it; the information is then transferred to a computer and read by the medical staff. In a similar way, life belt is a trans-abdominal wearable device that facilitates the parental monitoring procedures for both the mother and the fetus. It can access patients’ medical data at any time and can evaluate automated preliminary diagnosis of their condition base on collected data.
Sports and fitness
For sports and fitness, it is convenient for users to check their exercise time, intensity, distance, energy consumption, breathing, body temperature and other physiological parameters.
There are three components that must be present in smart textiles, these are sensors, actuators and controlling units. These components interact with one another accordingly with the stimuli in their environment. These smart cloths are created by modified textile material and miniaturized electronic devices. These clothes look like the ordinary cloth but they have the ability to provide special function in various situations according to the design and applications.
Now coming to the self-repairing material that we see in the movie
“Mission Mangal”
What they actually used was the wolverine cloth, ocean plastic and gold foil with the raw material that was brought from the different parts of India. Now, what is this wolverine cloth and what was its significance in Mars Mission?
Wolverine is a self-repairing, mechanically stretchable, conductive and transparent material that can be electrically activated to power artificial muscles, to improve the lifespan of batteries, electronic devices and to develop self-repairing robots. These materials can self-repair by stitching back together. This clothing line uses special fabric which has self-coating, it reacts to heat and friction and reconnect the punctured hole. These materials has many interesting properties like iron conductivity and at the same time they can stretch 50 times its original length, they possess the ability of self-repairing at the room temperature. The material is inspired by the regenerative ability of the comic book villain Wolverine.
In this age of smart fabrics, such a technology of self-healing or the automatic repairing gave rise to the innovative ideas in the field of smart textiles currently all over the world. Thus, smart textiles have a wide range of applications that has made our lives far easier and comfortable.