Protective suits that stiffen under high impact for skiers, racing-car drivers and astronauts are one of the potential applications for a new fabric developed by biomedical engineers at UNSW.
The fabric has been designed to mimic the sophisticated and complex properties of periosteum, a soft tissue sleeve that envelops most bony surfaces in the body. The complex arrangement of collagen, elastin and other structural proteins gives periosteum amazing resilience and provides bones with added strength under high impact loads.
UNSW Chair of Biomedical Engineering, Professor Melissa Knothe Tate, said her team had for the first time mapped the complex tissue architectures of the periosteum, visualised them in 3D on a computer, scaled up the key components and produced prototypes using weaving loom technology.
“The result is a series of textile swatch prototypes that mimic periosteum’s smart stress-strain properties. We have also demonstrated the feasibility of using this technique to test other fibres to produce a whole range of new textiles,” she said.
In order to understand the functional capacity of the periosteum, the team used an incredibly high fidelity imaging system to investigate and map its architecture.
“We then tested the feasibility of rendering periosteum’s natural tissue weaves using computer-aided design software,” Professor Knothe Tate said.
The computer modelling allowed the researchers to scale up nature’s architectural patterns to weave periosteum-inspired, multidimensional fabrics using a state-of-the-art computer-controlled jacquard loom. The loom is known as the original rudimentary computer, first unveiled in 1801.
“The challenge with using collagen and elastin is their fibres, that are too small to fit into the loom. So we used elastic material that mimics elastin and silk that mimics collagen,” she said.
There are potentials for the fabric in other areas with a tyremaker interested in a titanium weave which could spawn a new generation of thinner, stronger and safer steel-belt radials.
[UNSW Professor Melissa Knothe Tate with her computer-controlled jacquard loom. Photo: Paul Henderson Kelly]