This brief article describes the content of the August 2003 issue of MRS Bulletin focusing on Advanced Fabrics. The six articles will feature reviews of advanced fibers, new fabric constructions and design considerations, materials for novel fabric properties, and the incorporation of new elements within fabric structures to add multifunctional, wearable features to clothing.

Fibers and coatings with unique optical, magnetic, and electrical properties are being widely studied for use in both military and commercial applications. New materials are being developed in this research effort, with unique tunable coloration properties across the visible spectrum as well as spanning the infrared and ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. These dynamic color-responsive “chameleon” fiber systems will have wide application to a variety of new textile products. These new materials will also allow penetration into markets normally not dependent on textile materials. New markets, such as the optical communication and electronics market areas, will include bio-sensors, detector applications for textile materials, and “smart materials” that can change their color, hue, or depth of shade by application of a static or dynamic electric field for applications such as smart uniforms.

Protective clothing provides laboratory and hazardous-materials workers, firefighters, military personnel, and others with the means to control their exposure to chemicals, biological materials, and heat sources. Depending on the specific application, the textile materials used in protective clothing must provide high performance in a number of areas, for example, impermeability to hazardous chemicals, breathability, light weight, low cost, and durability. Models based on computational fluid dynamics have been developed to predict the performance of protective clothing materials. Such models complement testing by enabling property data from laboratory materials tests to be used in predictions of the performance of integrated multilayer garments under varying environmental conditions.

Military, firefighter, law enforcement, and medical personnel require high-level protection when dealing with chemical and biological threats in many environments ranging from combat to urban, agricultural, and industrial. Current protective clothing is based on full barrier protection, such as hazardous materials (HAZMAT) suits, or permeable adsorptive protective overgarments, such as those used by the U.S. military. New protective garment systems are envisioned that contain novel features, such as the capability to selectively block toxic chemicals, to chemically destroy toxic materials that contact the fabric, and to detect hazardous agents on the surface of the fabric. New technologies being built into advanced fabrics for enhanced chemical and biological protection include selectively permeable membranes, reactive nanoparticles, reactive nanofibers, biocidal fabric treatments, and conductive-polymer indicators on optical fibers.

High-performance fibers, used in fabric applications ranging from bulletproof vests to trampolines, must have a sufficient number of chemical and physical bonds for transferring the stress along the fiber. To limit their deformation, the fibers should possess high stiffness and strength. Stiffness is brought about by the degree to which the chemical bonds are aligned along the fiber axis. In fiber-reinforced composites, the fibers are the load-bearing element in the structure, and they must adhere well to the matrix material. An ideal reinforcing fiber must have high tensile and compressive moduli, high tensile and compressive strength, high damage tolerance, low specific weight, good adhesion to the matrix materials, and good temperature resistance. This article reviews and compares the properties and behavior of novel high-performance fiber materials including polyethylene, aramid, polybenzobisoxazole, M5, and carbon fibers.

Protection and aesthetics are the two common dimensions or attributes typically associated with textiles as clothing. However, with the rapidly changing needs of today's consumers, a third dimension is emerging—that of “intelligence”—that is being integrated into fabrics to produce interactive textiles, or i-textiles. This new class of wearable electronic systems is being designed to meet new and innovative applications in the military, public safety, healthcare, space exploration, sports, and consumer fitness fields. In this article, the concept of i-textiles is presented, along with the building blocks for its realization. This is followed by an overview of the design and development of the Smart Shirt, an “intelligent” garment that provides an extremely versatile framework for the incorporation of sensing, monitoring, and information-processing devices. The key applications of the Smart Shirt technology and their impact in transforming healthcare are discussed. Finally, the need to advance this paradigm and identify opportunities to transform passive textiles into the new generation of interactive, or “smart,” textiles is discussed.

This review examines textile fibers and fabrics in the context of their interaction with various forms of energy, such as electromagnetic (photolytic), electrical, magnetic, thermal, chemical, and mechanical. This interaction can involve conversion, storage, or management of energy. Examples are described suggesting some new material configurations that could be incorporated into textiles to create special energy-interactive textile (EITX) structures. Areas discussed are the management of electron flow (electrical resistivity) and the absorption of mechanical energy in textile fibers and fabrics. Surface resistance studies on carbon nanotubes and conductive carbon-black-filled films of poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) and paraffin wax show that the electrical conductivity of these materials depends upon the matrix material type and the amount of charge-carrying particles in the matrix. PMMA films filled with carbon nanotubes are found to be more electrically conductive than matrices filled with conductive carbon black. Mechanical-energy interactions of flocked textile surfaces show that in compression, they exhibit unique, gradual load-deflection behavior. This effect should be useful in applications requiring impact-energy absorption. Finally, the functional steps in an integrated energy-interactive textile system are discussed.