2.S990: Fiber & Textile Engineering (aka Fashion Engineering)
Lectures: Mon, Wed 9:30AM – 11:00AM
Level: Graduate (undergrads can take), 12 units: 3-1-8
Qualifies as as an elective class for MIT LGO & MEng in Advanced Manufacturing & Design programs.
The motto of this class is “ENGINEER SMALL THINK BIG.” You will learn what makes a fiber a unique engineered-to-the-extreme state of soft matter and how to hierarchically design new materials and products that derive their cumulative properties from the fiber as the smallest engineering building block. You will also get a feeling what it means to innovate for an industry that literally touches every single person on the planet at any given moment of time, meaning that a small innovation may be extremely impactful but only if it is compatible with the vast distributed industrial and supply infrastructure of a global industry where most of manufacture is done on a large scale.
Fashion is one of the oldest industries in the world, which is driving innovation in fabrication of both synthetic and naturally-derived materials, manufacturing processes, coloring techniques, and manufacturer-consumer interactions. Modern-day clothing is not merely decorative, but is designed to meet specific needs and challenges of extreme environment, occupational hazards, and health conditions, requiring combined R&D efforts of material scientists, electrical, mechanical, and optical engineers, physicians, and of course textile designers and artists. Fashion industry is also one of the most wasteful, with the textiles manufacturing alone using over 26T gallons of water and 98M tons of oil per year. About 200 liters of water are used to produce a mere 1 kg of textile! Textile production and maintenance pollutes water with dangerous toxins, and 73% of fabrics end up in landfills or being burned. These environmental concerns fuel the demand for the development of new sustainable materials as well as alternative fabrics manufacturing and coloring technologies.
The course will outline underlying physical and engineering principles that are used in engineering and manufacturing of fibers and textiles. These include fundamentals of polymer science, mechanical, thermal, and moisture transport engineering of fibrous media, visual color science and engineering, and friction and wear of polymer and composite fibrous materials. The course will include lab tours, hands-on experience, guest lectures, industry panels and discussions with mentors from industry, military, and academia currently working on the development of smart fibers, fabrics and garments. In the team exploratory project, student teams will analyze and make a presentation on one of highly successful commercialized fiber/textile-based technologies proposed by the instructor. In the final class project, each student will prepare and present a mock patent application describing a fiber- or textile-based product. Project ideas will proposed by the instructor in collaboration with the textile/design industry experts.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
- Impactful innovation on scale
- Major stages of fiber/textile engineering process
- Customer-oriented design & engineering
- Engineering for manufacturability
- Drop-in v. disruptive innovation
- Beyond fashion: engineering fibers/textiles for other applications
- Resource management, supply chains & sustainability
- Natural v synthetic fibers/textiles
- Resource competition with agriculture and other industries
- Distributed v localized manufacture
- Environmental footprint of textile fabrication processes
- Hierarchical engineering principles
- Fiber as an extreme-engineered state of soft matter
- Fiber-reinforced composites
- Yarn and textile engineering
- Bio-inspired and AI-enhanced engineering
- Electronic(+) textile envelope
- Material development & characterization pipeline
- Industrial testing standards
- Mechanical testing
- Structural/optical characterization
- Moisture & heat transport engineering and measurements
- Innovation and intellectual property
- History of innovation through the lens of textile industry
- What is and what is not patentable
- Landmark inventions and patents
- Hands-on experience in crafting a patent application
Prerequisites: none
Recommended: 2.00 Intro to Design; 2.001: Mechanics & Materials; 2.051: Intro to Heat Transfer
Evaluation: Class discussions 10%, Homework 30%, Exploratory team projects & class presentations 30%, Final design project 30%
Photonic materials
MIT Course Number: 2.719/2.718
Lectures: Tue-Thu 11AM – 12:30AM
Level: graduate + undergraduate, 12 units: 3-0-9
This class is gateway for a doctoral qualifying exam (in Optics) for the graduate students.
Light-matter interactions underscore the emerging fields of quantum science and engineering, energy harvesting, and radiative heat transfer. Understanding and engineering these interactions requires the knowledge of advanced computational techniques in both time and frequency domains. This course will equip the students with practical how-to information and computational tools to select, engineer, and optimize broadband optical response of materials and photonic devices for different applications as well as to process and visualize the results.
Concepts in optics, material science, and thermodynamics (light absorption, reflection, emission, guiding, visual color formation, radiative cooling and heating, photonic sensing, photonic metamaterials and meta-surfaces engineering) and numerical methods (data analysis and visualization, algorithms and software engineering, eigenproblem and boundary-value problem solutions, time- v. frequency-domain photonic solvers, direct v. inverse photonic design techniques) are introduced and applied to model and design photonic materials for a variety of applications. The target audience for the class includes students who focus on advancing photonic and materials engineering in their research as well as those who aim to understand practical aspects and use software tools to model optical behavior of materials for solar, thermal, wearable, radiation-shielding, biosensing, imaging, or environmental degradation applications. The course development has been supported with a curriculum development grant from MathWorks.
The students leave the course with a set of practical coding and visualization tools that they can build upon and/or apply directly to solving their research problems in the areas ranging from quantum materials to material spectroscopy to radiative heat transfer to photonic biosensing. The ultimate goal of the pilot is to educate “computing photonic materials bilinguals” – students fluent in computing, photonics, and materials science.
Syllabus:
The course will include six modules and a final project.
Module 1: Photonic fundamentals review (Optical fields and sources, Maxwell equations and constitutive relations, time-to-frequency domain transformations, dispersion equations).
Module 2: Canonic material models & material interfaces (Lorentz, Drude, and Debye models, reflection and refraction, interferometry, ellipsometry, colorimetry, data visualization).
Module 3: Global & local structure of optical fields; Guided and confined modes(Energy, momentum, stress tensor, reciprocity, polarization, surface modes and waveguiding modes, eigenvalue problems).
Module 4: Composite photonic materials & metamaterials (Light scattering by small particles; effective permittivity models, zero- and negative-index metamaterials, photonic crystals and quasicrystals, role of symmetries in photonic and numerical design, anisotropic and optically-active materials).
Module 5: Thermo-photonic materials (Solar and thermal radiation, frequency-selective surfaces, radiative cooling, laser cooling, plasmonic heating, intro to the near-field heat transfer).
Module 6: Photonic material fabrication & characterization techniques (Lithography, epitaxy, colloidal chemistry, extrusion, X-ray spectroscopy, Raman scattering, FTIR spectroscopy.
Advanced topics: Quantum and topological materials (2D materials, low-symmetry materials, ferromagnets, ferroelectrics, multiferroics, phase transitions).
Computing topics to be covered throughout the course: recursion, numerical integration, direct v. inverse design, uniqueness of solutions, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, root search algorithms in real and complex domains, algorithm stability and convergence properties, optimization, spectral analysis, data visualization.
Prerequisites
18.02 Calculus, 8.02 Physics II or 6.013 Electromagnetics and Applications, and 18.03 Differential Equations
Recommended: 2.71/2.710 Optics, 2.096J Introduction to Numerical Simulation, 2.097J Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations.
Assignments: There will be 10 assignments based on using & modifying computational demos provided by the instructor (60%) and one final design project (40%).
Final Project deliverables: Project report in the form of a letter-length manuscript describing a metamaterial or a metamaterial-based device, its application/impact & design strategy + 15 minute presentation .
The final class projects will focus on studying and presenting a design of a photonic metamaterial or a metamaterial-/ composite-media based device, describing the physics behind its operation and application areas. Metamaterial examples from the literature will be provided by the instructor.
