In a cluttered subterranean laboratory at MIT, Jung Tae Lee is attempting to make a battery as long and thin as a fishing line. With a focused gaze, the postgraduate researcher adjusts the knobs on an imposing blue machine that heats up and stretches out filament. “Must stabilize before making active fiber,” he mutters.
Benjamin Grena is more loquacious. The grad student explains that the blue machine, which stands nearly twice his height, is a draw tower, a custom version of an industrial appliance used to extrude glass rods into fiber-optic cable. Lee will make his device by elongating, or drawing, a fat polymer cylinder that has been embedded with electrodes and injected with battery fluids. The trick is to keep the metals and liquids aligned, as Lee heats and stretches the cylinder until its diameter is ideally a mere 1/200th its original size — a high-precision variation on pulling saltwater taffy. “And then,” Grena says, “you’ll have a power source that can be woven together with sensors and other functional fibers.”
These resulting electronic textiles could be worn as garments, implanted in a body or blanketed across a city. For Yoel Fink — Grena and Lee’s MIT adviser and supervisor, respectively, and the mastermind behind the high-tech threads — the textiles represent nothing less than a turning point in human civilization. “Fabrics have remained sort of immutable since the Late Stone Age,” Fink says. “That’s because they’re made of fibers that are made of a single material, and so long as you make fibers of a single material, they’re not going to be highly functional.”
With a method for crafting fibers that integrate everything from polymers to metals and fluids — and then controlling the internal arrangement of these materials — Fink envisions vast new possibilities for fabrics. And given the ubiquity of textiles in our world, he believes the fibers he’s working on will profoundly augment technology as a whole.
Fink’s vision is attracting a following well beyond the basements of MIT. In 2016, he founded an institute called Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA), a public-private consortium comprising more than two dozen major research institutions, including Drexel University in Philadelphia and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The consortium also includes influential technology companies such as Tesla and Corning, as well as the U.S. Department of Defense.
