SBIR Phase I: Scalable Manufacture of Natural Fiber Welded Yarn

该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。天然纤维焊接是一种将天然纤维中的聚合物膨胀和活化以制造出更高性能的纱线和织物的工艺。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和粘合在一起，同时保留了大多数天然聚合物的自然结构和顺序。这导致改善的机械性能，同时保持天然产品的好处。此外，在焊接过程中，功能材料和化学物质，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。例如，这种新能力有可能取代目前的资源密集型工艺，如牛仔布的靛蓝染色，这是一个需要大量设备投资的水和化学密集型工艺。通过天然纤维焊接工艺加入靛蓝染料具有巨大的潜力，可以减少牛仔布生产对环境的影响，同时节省成本，同时提高织物的性能，并具有创新的新设计效果。这种类型的颠覆性创新将在每年数万亿美元的纺织业价值链中带来可持续的美国制造业。离子液体是一种非常有前途和可调的天然纤维焊接溶剂。本项目探索几种新型离子液体溶剂系统，与新的自动化硬件设计共同优化，以经济有效地制定与棉花和其他含天然纤维的纱线基材的天然纤维焊接工艺。这样，离子液体基工艺溶剂在闭环循环过程中回收，从而实现经济可行性，并创建一个环保的制造平台。该项目将专注于证明离子液体和助溶剂的新组合的概念，以实现与靛蓝染色同时焊接，同时开发高效的回收方法。有已知的方法分离离子液体在稀水溶液中，但这些尚未开发的情况下，额外的混溶共溶剂的存在。该项目的目的是演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材中，同时通过含有助溶剂的工艺溶剂实现高回收率，并为每年生产数十亿磅的牛仔布产品提供可扩展的工艺。

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.