New Materials! Webinar Series – Live Talk about smart fibers with Prof. Alexander Gumennik
with
Alexander Gumennik
Indiana University
Fibers and fabrics are among the most ancient expressions of humans. As opposed to sewing skins of animals, production of the first felt is one of the major markers of human civilization shifting from ancient, nomadic, hunter-gatherer to modern, settled, agrarian structure. Since this shift, though, the fibers and fabrics have not evolved beyond the traditional uses in warming us up, protecting from physical injury, and signaling societal status. In the last century, with the invention of fiber-optics and the later emergence of flexible electronics, the shift in perception began happening. People started thinking, why is that the cloth – our second skin – cannot get sensitive and reactive to the environment as the real skin does? How to make a t-shirt you wearing sense your stress, and massage you to help you relax? Or how to make it store the solar energy during the day and use it to keep you warm during the night.
In the last couple of decades, a monofilament fiber produced by a thermal draw has made a giant step away from a simple core-shell structure familiar from fiber-optics due to the emergence of material processing strategies for wrapping electronic, photonic, piezoelectric, and microfluidic devices into a fiber in an ordered, addressable, and scalable manner. Applications in development include but aren’t limited to fiber microelectronics for edge computing and sensing in the Internet of Things (IoT), fibers for hardware-brain interfaces, fiber devices for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, and even fibers for quantum sensing and computing. All that on top of the sensing and transduction in textiles for apparel and wearables mentioned above. In this webinar, we will discuss the material processing strategies enabling those functionalities, and the approach to creating a lab, ground up, capable of performing 21st-Century Material Science research in fiber devices.
Live Stream at 3 pm GMT, May 20th starts here: