Smart textiles achievements

Sadamichi, Y., Kimura, Y., Widiyanto, A., Kato, S., Maruyatna, N., Nishimura, A., 2003. LCA evaluation of reuse/recycle impact for environmental conscious industrial products. In Environmentally Conscious Design and Inverse Manufacturing, 2003. EcoDesign 03. 2003 3rd International Symposium, 8—11 December 2003, pp. 339—343. Tokyo, Japan. SMART, December 15, 2004. Sustainable Textile Standard 2.0 -Promoting Sustainable Textile Achievement, the Institute for Market Transformation to Sustainability, Einal Approved Consensus Ballot Version. 

Both smart materials and structures can be used to achieve physiological comfort of protective clothing. In this chapter, three groups of typical examples of incorporating smart textile technologies into protective clothing to achieve clothing comfort are discussed. 

This book highlights aU the main fields of applications of smart textiles. The scientific issues and proposed solutions regarding various results, prototypes and achievements obtained in the best academic and industrial laboratories worldwide are discussed in a rigorous scientific manner. At the same time practical solutions and realization, intended to be of interest to industrial partners, are presented and explained in the second part of chapters. Therefore, the book should be useful for researchers and students in academia as well as also for existing companies and start-ups that are developing products using the concept of smart textiles. 

Microcapsules are often rather sensitive to mechanical stresses fliat could be involved in fabric treatment. Chemical compatibihty of all elements involved in the system fabric/microcapsules could be a determining factor in achieving a smart textile with satisfying washing fastness, intended for durable and controlled release of an... 

In this chapter we have chosen not to focus on specific examples of smart textiles application in order to avoid narrowing the field of smart implantable fibrous medical devices to a few innovative textile properties. Contrariwise, fiber characteristics are pointed out to show that all of them, in a prospective designing approach, could achieve smart features in the implantable device area. However, we are limited in exploratory areas using new materials because a decline is needed to be certain that a material is accepted by the body. Given the diversity of appreciation of smart appearance, as well as the implantable medical device aspect, we have focused on the biocompatibility and biointegration of substitutes in their environment. This theme therefore needs to be complemented by other approaches such as the concepts of smart attitude and implantable device as related in Fig. 13.1. 

For the production of smart textiles, a consistently and closely interlocked value chain must be built up. This value chain allows one to adjust and hand over process parameter flexibly. Manufacturing and joining technology should be organized as a direct or joined process in order to achieve a reasonable and cost-efficient solution. Tool handling, cutting, feeding and removal of the textile for automatic assembly must be solved. 

The common SMPs only show the thermally-induced one-way SME. After recovery, an external force is usually required to transform the permanent shape to the temporary shape. Although, as outlined above, two-way SMEs may be achieved in polymer laminated composites, it is still not easy in textiles to utilize a solid film, as the sole SMP fiber or layer cannot fabricate a satisfactorily intelligent smart textile. 

This example of vascular grafts devices points out the evolution of fibrous implantable medical devices and highlights the great potential offered by each scale level of fibrous structures for biocompatibility improvements. Fibers as well as whole fibrous stmctures should be considered as implantable devices that have inherent abilities to interact with the biological environment at each of the three predetermined scale levels. Study of characteristics and specificities of fibers, fibrous siuface, and fibrous volume should then provide a more forward-looking approach in the textile substitute s area for design and achievement of smart medical implantable textile devices. 

The prototype snowmobile suit developed within this project is a smart garment. Cross-scientifically, electronic and textile innovations were combined, and the objectives were achieved. The suit works as planned. It is not likely that the prototype costing 1 million dollars to create will be commercially exploited in its exact shape and form. However, much was learned. Several innovations, including the user interface, were patented and will be commercially applied in the future. The garment manufacturer Reima-Tutta Oy launched snowboard clothing with electronic devices in the autumn of 2000. 

Wearable antennas, based on conductive textiles, exploit new flexible and smart structures without affecting the native textile properties (Giddens et al., 2012). To achieve this result, conductive textiles such as Zelt, Flectron and pure copper polyester fabrics are typically used as the radiating elanent, while nonconductive textiles are used as substrates (Rais et al., 2009). The geometry of an antenna developed for body wearable appUcations is shown in Fig. 4.21. 

Figure 12.1 shows a smart shirt known as the Sphere React Shirt (Nike, 2007), whose rear vents can open up to allow perspiration and heat to escape when the wearer perspires. The vents automatically close at the dry state. It canbe particularly effective to use thermal/moisture-dual responsive shape memory textiles which can change macro-shape or microstractuies to achieve functions for moisture and heat management between skin and fabric. For example, if the wearer begins to... 

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