Hang Liu
Washington State University, WA·Materials Science·Early-career
Clothing that can sense movement, monitor health, or respond to its surroundings needs conductive threads that still behave like textile fibers: flexible, strong enough to be woven, and comfortable. One family of materials, intrinsically conductive polymers, carries electricity through the chemical bonds along its own molecular backbone and can be chemically modified for added functions.
- Fields
Materials Science
Engineering
- Topics
intrinsically conductive polymers
wet spinning
side-by-side fibers
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Determine how spinneret geometry shapes side-by-side fiber formation when an intrinsically conductive polymer is co-spun with a conventional spinnable polymer in a wet-spinning process.
- Characterize the interactions at the interface between the two polymer solutions, including complex fluid interaction kinetics under varied spinning conditions.
- Measure how polymer solution properties and spinning control parameters affect the mechanical, electrical, and sensing performance of the resulting bicomponent fibers.
- Use computational fluid dynamics modeling to simulate solution hydrodynamics inside the spinneret and in the coagulation bath, in order to simplify and optimize experimental design.
More about the research
The catch is that their stiff molecular structure makes them very hard to spin into usable fibers on their own.
Why it matters
Flexible conductive fibers that can be manufactured reliably would enable smart garments with embedded sensors for healthcare monitoring, military use, and athletic performance. A fundamental understanding of how two polymer streams fuse during spinning also carries over to electrospinning, 3D printing with inks, and microfluidic fiber production, supporting domestic textile manufacturing capability.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Andrei Stanishevsky
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Materials Science
Develop nanofiber-based catalysts that are efficient, selective and stable for industrial processes, through experimental and computational projects at partner sites in Poland.
Jun Li
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Daytona Beach, FL·Engineering
Develop direct mesoscale simulations of 3D printing that couple heat, mechanical forces, chemistry and fluid-structure interactions, to show how temperature gradients and melting between filaments and reinforcing fibers lead to micro-cracks.
Katia Bertoldi
Harvard University, MA·Engineering
Develop quantitative measures of entanglement by testing 3D-printed textile architectures and woven metamaterials, which are structures whose properties come from their designed geometry, in both mechanical experiments and simulations.
The school
Washington State University: 22 labs on PI Pages, $403M a year on research, 259 research doctorates a year.
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