SBIR Phase I: Scalable Manufacture of Natural Fiber Welded Yarn

SBIR 第一阶段：天然纤维熔接纱的可规模化制造

• 批准号: 1747149
• 负责人: Aaron Amstutz
• 金额: $ 22.5万
• 依托单位: Natural Fiber Welding, Inc.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-01-01 至 2018-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1747149&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; Scalable; Manufacture; Natural

This SBIR Phase I project aims to prove the technical feasibility and the economic viability of natural fiber welded and dyed yarns and fabrics. Natural fiber welding is process that swells and mobilizes polymers within natural fibers to create higher performance yarns and fabrics. At sufficiently fast rates, individual fibers are fused and bonded together without glues or resins while retaining a majority of the natural structure and order of natural polymers. This leads to improved mechanical properties while maintaining the benefits of a natural product. Moreover, during the welding process, functional materials and chemistries including dyes, antimicrobials, and flame retardants can be simultaneously locked within yarns and fabrics in new eco-friendly ways. This new ability has potential to displace, for example, present day resource intensive processes such as indigo dyeing for denim which is a water and chemical intensive process that requires significant equipment investment. Inclusion of indigo dye via natural fiber welding processes has tremendous potential to reduce the environmental impact of denim manufacture while saving costs and simultaneously improving the performance of resultant fabrics and with innovative new design effects. This type of disruptive innovation would bring in sustainable US-based manufacturing throughout the value chain of the massive multitrillion dollar per year textile industry.An extremely promising and tunable class of solvents for natural fiber welding processes are called ionic liquids. This project explores several new types of ionic liquid-based solvent systems co-optimized with new automated hardware designs to cost effectively enact natural fiber welding processes with cotton and other natural fiber-containing yarn substrates. In so doing, ionic liquid-based process solvents are recovered in a closed-loop recycling process thereby enabling economic viability as well as creating an eco-friendly manufacturing platform. This project will focus on proving proof of concept with new combinations of ionic liquid(s) and co-solvent(s) to enable concurrent welding with indigo dyeing while developing high efficiency recycling methodologies. There are known methodologies to separate ionic liquids in dilute aqueous solutions but these have not yet been developed for situations where additional miscible co-solvents are present. The objective of this project is to demonstrate natural fiber welding processes that deliver indigo dye into cotton-based yarn substrates while achieving high rates of recycling with process solvents that contain co-solvent(s) and to enable scalable processes for potentially billions of pounds of denim products produced annually.

SBIR一期项目旨在证明天然纤维焊接和染色纱线和织物的技术可行性和经济可行性。天然纤维熔接是使天然纤维中的聚合物溶胀和流动的过程，以产生更高性能的纱线和织物。在足够快的速度下，单个纤维在没有胶水或树脂的情况下融合并粘合在一起，同时保留天然聚合物的大部分天然结构和顺序。这导致改善的机械性能，同时保持天然产品的益处。此外，在焊接过程中，功能性材料和化学品（包括染料、抗菌剂和阻燃剂）可以以新的环保方式同时锁定在纱线和织物中。这种新的能力有可能取代，例如，目前的资源密集型工艺，如牛仔布的靛蓝染色，这是一种需要大量设备投资的水和化学品密集型工艺。通过天然纤维焊接工艺包含靛蓝染料具有巨大的潜力，可以减少牛仔布制造对环境的影响，同时节省成本，同时提高所得织物的性能，并具有创新的新设计效果。这种颠覆性创新将在每年数万亿美元的纺织业的整个价值链中带来可持续的美国制造业。用于天然纤维焊接工艺的一种极具前景和可调的溶剂被称为离子液体。该项目探索了几种新型的基于离子液体的溶剂系统，这些溶剂系统与新的自动化硬件设计共同优化，以具有成本效益的方式使用棉花和其他含天然纤维的纱线基质进行天然纤维焊接工艺。通过这样做，基于离子液体的工艺溶剂在闭环回收工艺中回收，从而实现经济可行性并创建生态友好的制造平台。该项目将专注于证明离子液体和助溶剂的新组合的概念验证，以实现与靛蓝染色同时进行焊接，同时开发高效回收方法。存在已知的分离稀水溶液中的离子液体的方法，但是这些方法尚未被开发用于存在另外的可混溶共溶剂的情况。该项目的目标是展示天然纤维焊接工艺，该工艺将靛蓝染料输送到棉基纱线基质中，同时使用含有助溶剂的工艺溶剂实现高回收率，并为每年生产的数十亿磅牛仔产品提供可扩展的工艺。