An overview of engineering, manufacturing, and innovation principles used in textile production, this course will teach you to hierarchically design fiber-based smart materials and products and to craft utility patent applications to protect your inventions.
An overview of engineering, manufacturing, and innovation principles used in textile production, this course will teach you to hierarchically design fiber-based smart materials and products and to craft utility patent applications to protect your inventions.
This online course from the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering introduces basic physical and engineering principles that are used in engineering and manufacturing of fibers and textiles. You will learn the fundamentals of polymer science, mechanical, thermal, and moisture transport engineering of fibrous media, overview of both industrial and lab-scale textile manufacturing techniques and machinery, visual color science and engineering, and design of composite fibrous materials.
In this course, you will:
None (basic high-school-level knowledge of algebra, chemistry, physics, history, fashion design, and environmental science)
Dr. Svetlana V. Boriskina is a Principal Research Scientist and the Director of Multifunctional Metamaterials (META) Lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She earned a Ph.D. in Physics and Mathematics (1999) and M.Sc. in Radiophysics and Electronics (1995) from Kharkiv National University in Ukraine, and a M.Sc. in Patent Law and Informatics from Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute (1995). Dr. Boriskina’s multi-disciplinary research at MIT blends polymer, fiber, and textile engineering with photonics, opto-electronics, thermodynamics, and mechanics. Her META Research Lab pioneered 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, fiber-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. Many textile technologies (and associated patents) discussed in the class originate from Dr. Boriskina’s MIT META lab.
Ikra Shuvo is a PhD student at MIT, co-supervised by Dr. Svetlana Boriskina and Dr. Joseph Paradiso. He earned a BSc in Textile Engineering from BUTEX, specializing in Chemical Wet Processing, as well as an MS in Biosystems Engineering from the University of Manitoba and an MS in Textiles at the University of Alberta. Ikra’s past research at MIT focused on microfabricating high-frequency (3-15 MHz) ultrasonic transducer arrays with wearable characteristics for imaging breast cancer, wireless energy transfer, and other biomedical applications. He now works on advancing fiber-based technologies for applications in vibrational energy and atmospheric water harvesting, wearable sensors technologies, plastic pollution reduction, and medicine.