Squid Skin: The Surprising Inspiration for an Advanced Textile
Clothing fibers are diverse in origin. Silk is larva excretion. Nylon is reconfigured petroleum. So don’t be surprised to learn that researchers in California are developing a new high tech fabric that owes a lot to squid skin.
No one is proposing to butcher cephalopods — octopus, squid, and cuttlefish — in order to stitch together pant suits. For Alon Gorodetsky, a materials chemist at the University of California, Irvine, these animals are a source of inspiration, not raw material.
In 2011 Gorodetsky saw a video of an octopus uncloaking itself from the surface of a rock. “It was like something out of a science fiction movie,” he says. “It was kind of like the equivalent of what you see these days in X-men movies, except it was real, which is what makes it absolutely crazy.” Gorodetsky, 35, had recently accepted an assistant professorship in the department of chemical engineering and materials science at UC, Irvine. After seeing the video he became obsessed with cephalopods, which have animated much of his research ever since.
Gorodetsky and his students went on to study the protein in cephalopod skin that allows the sea creatures to self-camouflage. They synthesized fistfuls of the protein and produced a kind of invisibility tape that could eventually be used to hide soldiers from night vision goggles. The protein coated tape works by adaptively reflecting near infrared light.
Gorodetsky is now taking that concept one step further, developing a material to be incorporated into textiles that will control the reflectance of thermal infrared light, which is radiant heat. The closest analogy is a space blanket, the crinkly foil-like sheet that a marathon runner often receives at the finish line. These sheets control radiant heat exchange between the human body and its surroundings. If the idea can be successfully transferred to fabric, says Gorodetsky, you’d have clothing that is responsive to changing room temperatures. Imagine an ultra-thin lightweight shirt that keeps you both warm and cool, depending on conditions, by trapping or blocking thermal radiation.
His research is funded with a $2.5 million dollar grant from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E initiative, which invests in early stage energy technologies. The DOE’s interest in Gorodetsky’s research derives from the vast amount of energy needed to heat, ventilate and air condition (HVAC) buildings. HVAC accounts for about 13% of all energy consumption in the United States, and buildings are often wildly energy inefficient.
I once worked for a company where, at the height of air conditioning season, the marketing manager would crank a space heater in her office to keep from freezing. That probably added twenty bucks per month to the company’s power bill, hardly enough to justify a big investment in modernizing the HVAC system. Making existing buildings more energy efficient is often expensive and not the most economic use of capital. And unlike, say, light bulbs or even automobiles, buildings do not turn over quickly. New building technologies take a long time to percolate.
So rather than upgrading the HVAC, upgrade the clothing. That’s the premise underlying ARPA-E’s investment, not just in Gorodetsky project, but a half dozen textile innovations clustered within ARPA-E’s DELTA Program (Delivering Efficient Local Thermal Amenities). The goal is development of novel fabrics and small heating-cooling devices to keep people comfortable over a wider range of indoor temperatures. By setting the air conditioning to kick on at 7⁸⁰F rather than 7⁵⁰F or activating the furnace at 6⁶⁰F rather than 6⁸⁰F, a tremendous amount of energy can be saved. One study showed that adjusting the thermostats in an office building by a few degrees in either direction can reduce energy consumption by 34%. Advanced fabrics promise to enable such seemingly minor behavioral shifts, especially in professional settings where people are unlikely to wear wool hats or tank tops to deal with uncomfortable temperatures.
In the laboratory Gorodetsky has already made his new squid-inspired material. It’s made of long chain artificial polymers. Gorodetsky says the stuff works, rejecting or conserving thermal radiation in ways that could make high tech cardigans a reality. The material is spongey and rubber-like, he says, though this is not the fabric itself. Rather it is a component which needs to be incorporated into fibers. Getting it into cloth won’t be hard, Gorodetsky says, but making the product durable will be a real challenge. He’s been working closely with Under Armour, the apparel company, on material-fabric integration. “The sophistication that goes into your clothing to make it stand up to everyday wear and tear, it’s a tremendous amount of effort,” says Gorodetsky. “So the goal is not only to make something that can work, but to make it rugged enough for a person to run around in and wash it hundreds of times.”
Gorodetsky’s ARPA-E funding runs out in 2018. At that time he will owe the DOE a deliverable, a swatch of high tech fabric. Sometime thereafter, with any luck, you’ll find Octopus inspired couture in the department store.
Originally published at west.energy on April 5, 2016.
