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The New Textile Technology
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12393 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1987 |
3,875 Words |
| Author
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Albin F. Turbak
Albin F. Turbak is director of the School of Textile
Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta,
Georgia. |
Today a typical man's shirt contains about 900 miles of filament - enough to stretch from Atlanta to New York City. Filament fiber extruders spin this fine yarn at a speed of 250 miles an hour. This ability to spin cobweb-size filaments at jet airplane speeds with sufficient precision to maintain constant elongation, molecular orientation, fiber diameter, and tenacity (fiber strength per unit weight) dramatically illustrates the sophistication of the new textile technology.
The new kinds of textiles possess characteristics that make them useful in numerous formerly unexpected applications. Although textiles are still the major component of the clothes we wear and of many furnishings in our homes and offices, they are also used widely in medicine, aeronautics, astronautics, pollution abatement, and numerous other fields. Some new textiles possess qualities that make them stain-resistant, flameproof, and even stiff. Some are "nonwoven" matrices of overlapping fibers. Innovation in textile technology continues and more unusual products will almost surely emerge.
Replacing body parts
Certain fibers and textile materials are especially suitable for use in building synthetic body parts and medical scientists are steadily expanding the types of body parts whose function can be mimicked.
The artificial kidney is made from 7,000 hollow fibers, each of which is about the size of a human hair. Patients whose kidneys no longer function normally must have their blood freed by dialysis of metabolic wastes and excess water about every three days. This is accomplished by pumping the blood through a textile, hollow-fiber module while cleansing solution rinses the blood free of urea, creatinine, and other impurities. Hospitals also use such blood dialysis on patients who have taken poisons or overdoses of medicines or drugs. This technique is more likely than time-consuming normal body elimination to save their lives. Without the especially prepared cuprammonium rayon hollow textile fibers, there would be no artificial kidneys and thousands of people would die each year. These rayon fibers have exactly the right pore size to allow poisons and waste products to pass through while retaining the blood for return to the body after cleaning.
Artificial arteries made of knitted polyester textile tubes are used for many patients whose natural arteries leading to their legs are blocked. Patients with diabetes
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