Smart Fabrics

Smart fabrics (e.g. integrating responsive materials, sensors, filters, energy generating materials, etc.) could protect human health and/or improve human quality of life.

The overall aim of the Smart Fabrics team is to apply fundamental engineering principles to create smart fabrics that solve practical problems to impact human quality of life. The initial focus of the Smart Fabrics team will be to achieve smart fabrics with temperature responsive reflective properties as the next generation of thermal comfort textiles. Temperature-responsive properties will be achieved by incorporating liquid crystals into the polymer fibers.

Projects will include:

• Produce fiber samples that change color with temperature; optimize process parameters to maximize liquid crystal loading, fiber uniformity, and fiber stability
• Design and implement methods typically used for liquids to measure the fabric color as a function of temperature
• Analyze the experimental data correlate observed color and measured quantities

The team is looking for Engineering students (all majors) with a strong motivation work in cross-disciplinary teams to create smart material approaches to practical problems.

Interested? Contact Prof. Christina Tang (ctang2@vcu.edu)