Textile Innovation Meets Fundamental Science
January 29 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Nowadays, textile and fiber research is considered a very applied field, which is hardly surprising given how old and mature the global textile industry is.
Historically, however, inventions that led to textile innovations have been often of fundamental nature, and many even recognized by Noble prizes in chemistry and physics.
In this webinar, Dr. Svetlana V. Boriska makes the case that fibers and textiles still offer an amazing playground for studying fundamental phenomena, which in turn may lead to advances in their functional properties and applications.
In the Multifunctional Metamaterials (META) Lab at MIT, fibers and fiber-derived materials are engineered from the bottom up, and aim to unlock new functional performance through fundamental insights into their meso-scale structure, viscoelastic properties, radiation-matter interactions, etc. I will highlight a few examples of our completed and ongoing projects, including engineering new fibers as a solid-state replacement for the HVAC technology, tailoring interfacial moisture transport phenomena, modifying neutron-matter interactions, and leveraging computer-vision-augmented AI techniques and graph theory for generative design of textiles and studies of their degradation pathways.
They are always open for collaborations, and will give an overview of their capabilities, including manufacturing, characterization, and modeling tools we can leverage to advance joint projects with industry, military, and national labs.
For more information, please visit https://sites.mit.edu/metalab/, check out the textile-focused project portfolio, and explore a new MITx course to advance your knowledge in fiber and textile innovations.
About the presenter:
Svetlana V. BoriskinaPrincipal Research Scientist; Director, META research Lab
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Massachusetts Institute of Technologyhttps://sites.mit.edu/sboriskinaDr. Boriskina’s multi-disciplinary research blends photonics, opto-electronics, polymer physics, thermodynamics, fluidics, and mechanics. Her Multifunctional Metamaterials (META) Research Lab develops new materials and technologies to harvest and manipulate light, heat, and acoustic waves. She makes smart stain-resistant fabrics that provide thermal comfort indoors and outdoors, new meta-materials that bend light in unusual ways and exhibit tunable color without any dyes or pigments, polymer-based solid-state cooling technologies to replace conventional HVACs, and opto-thermo-mechanical technologies to provide clean energy and fresh water to off-electrical-grid and disaster-stricken communities.Svetlana is the author and co-author of over 130 peer-reviewed papers, several award-winning courses, and multiple patens, and has led multiple U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Energy, NATO, and industry-funded projects. She received a Joint Award of the International Commission for Optics and the A. Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, a NATO-UK Royal Society Fellowship, and a SUMMA Graduate Fellowship in Electromagnetics, and has served as a Director-at-Large at Optica, the Lead Editor for the Optics Energy & Environmental Express, a Topical Editor for the IOP Journal of Optics, an Advisory Board Member for the Optics and Photonics News Magazine, and the Lead Faculty for the MIT Consortium United4Knowledge: Ukraine.Sustainable and cooling SVETEX textile technology pioneered by Boriskina’s lab has won a TechConnect Innovation Award and an MIT Water Innovation prize, was a semi-finalist in a Microfiber Innovation Challenge run by the Flotilla Foundation, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and Conservation X Labs, and a semi-finalist in the EarthShot Northeast Edition prize.