Innovations in Textile Engineering: Fibers, Yarns, Nonwovens, & More
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.
Course Information
Certificate Track
Learn for Free
About this Course
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.
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 in the industry that literally touches every single person on the planet at any given moment of time, amplifying the impact of any innovation compatible with its large-scale distributed industrial and supply infrastructure.
The course will guide you through several examples of iconic commercialized textile-based technologies to cement the new knowledge, will reinforce the learning process via peer-to-peer discussions, and will culminate with the practical exercise of crafting your own mock patent applications. Several mock applications created by MIT students taking the residential version of this class have been converted into filed utility patent applications.
What you'll learn
In this course, you will:
- Learn the major stages of fiber/textile manufacture and industrial and academic fiber/textile testing standards
- Review the history of innovation and intellectual property protection through the lens of textile industry
- Select a fiber/yarn type, a fabric structure, and a manufacturing process for your research project or a commercial product
- Practice implementing hierarchical and bio-inspired engineering principles
- Evaluate the risks of resource competition, environmental footprint, and product sustainability
- Gain hands-on experience in crafting a patent application
Prerequisites
None (basic high-school-level knowledge of algebra, chemistry, physics, history, fashion design, and environmental science)
Meet your instructors
Svetlana Boriskina
Principal Research Scientist and the Director of Multifunctional Metamaterials (META) Lab
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.
