Engineering, re-engineering and reverse engineering of textiles or textile genetic engineering

Citation

Stylios, G. (1998), "Engineering, re-engineering and reverse engineering of textiles or textile genetic engineering", International Journal of Clothing Science and Technology, Vol. 10 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijcst.1998.05810baa.001

Engineering, re-engineering and reverse engineering of textiles or textile genetic engineering

Engineering, re-engineering and reverse engineering of textiles or textile genetic engineering

Textiles and clothing are two industries that were developed from traditional handicrafts, as required to make clothes to protect us from the environment. Consequently, the fundamentals of spinning, weaving and stitching were established then and have evolved through many generations. During this evolution the textile industry has inherited a strong dependence on people's skill and experience which is predominant even at the turn of this century, posing difficult but interesting techno-socio-economic problems.

Textile materials are a category of limp materials that we use owing to their inherent ease of conforming into three-dimensional surfaces even when in dynamic situations, i.e. during wearing. Textile fabrics are complicated structures, made of different natural and man-made materials, and undergo a variety of processes which provide them with functional and aesthetic properties to fulfil consumer demands.

I have spoken in the past, through this platform, about new research efforts in establishing the new field of intelligent textile and garment manufacture where machine/material/human interactions are the basis of new systems, processes and products. An important area within this field is how we can move from the subjective development of new textiles to an objective engineering-like approach to products and processes. The majority of textiles made today are produced by non-specific, ad hoc specifications, sometimes with trial and error regimes. What I am trying to say, is that in an engineering discipline we do not have engineering approaches to developing and making textile products. An example from our neighbour community is that it would be inconceivable for a building to be built without strict engineering of its structure with the most appropriate materials and designs dealt by civil engineering calculations and predictions. Equally an aeroplane or a car is built in the same way by calculating, predicting and specifying precisely in advance how it will be made and with what raw materials, to achieve specified performance criteria. I will, of course, argue with any of our fellow engineers in other fields that their task is relatively easier than ours, because they have to deal with relatively well defined, rigid materials and specific requirements, but I am going to challenge our sector by saying that we now have the technology and the know-how to do the same, and we must work to achieving more in this field. I have in the past talked about textile genetic engineering, IJCST has published for the first time results in intelligent garment manufacture and we have put forward non-conventional methodologies using neural networks, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms and chaos theory or their combination with conventional physical and/or mathematical approaches to develop own hybrid models and technological solutions to solve our complex problems. We can discuss the ability of feedback from attributes to raw material properties to re-engineer or reverse engineer a material, how this may link with processing conditions of machinery and how machinery conditions may be optimised. We are now able to link consumer attributes with raw materials and processes so that our products are engineered under rigid specifications efficiently, right first time and just-in-time, minimising waste and energy. There are examples of research programmes that are using these principles; one of them, which was completed in 1996, tries to put forward the reverse engineering principle in the difficult area of textile handling. Although the paper as a whole is published elsewhere, the mathematical part of this research is shown as a Letter to the Editor in this issue of IJCST.

From now on IJCST welcomes Letters to the Editor for our community of researchers for fast-track publishing of important findings, much shorter than papers and of not more than two pages maximum length.

George Stylios