NEWS

This week, M. Ardanuy visited The Swedish School of Textiles - University of Borås, leveraging their advanced equipment to push our research forward in the framework of Waste2Build project.

During this week, she has focused on advanced tensile testing of textile fibres, fibre length measurements, and electrical conductivity testing of conductive yarns.

A huge thank you to Nawar Kadi for granting access to these top-tier facilities and for our productive meetings. We are setting up exciting collaborative research activities focused on the mechanical recycling of textiles and advanced textiles. ♻️🤝

Great thanks also to Junchun Yu and Emanuel Gunnarsson!

Huge congratulations to our PhD researchers Zewen Liu and Zhuo Li for successfully defending their Research Plans!

• Zewen Liu will focus on "Recovering Fibres From Textile Wastes As Secondary Raw Materials Through Mechanical Recycling", supervised by M. Ardanuy.

• Zhuo Li will work on "Textile-integrated photovoltaic cells for outdoor textile applications", supervised by M. Ardanuy & F. Cano.

Congrats to both! 

Congratulations to Zeyue Xie on the successful defense of the PhD thesis “Development of Nonwoven-Reinforced ECCCs and Multifunctional Smart Textiles for Energy Harvesting and Thermal Management in Buildings”. 

Zeyue’s work pushes the boundaries of the building industry towards a more sustainable future. His research focuses on incorporating smart functions into fabrics and textile-reinforced cement composites (ECCCs), creating an integrated system capable of thermal management, sensing, and energy harvesting within a single framework. 

Congrats, Dr. Zeyue Xie! Best of luck in your next chapter! 🎓🎉

Oskar’s research, titled "Enhancing Textile Circularity: Investigating Multi-Cycle Mechanical Recycling of Cotton Fabrics," aims to understand what happens when we mechanically recycle cotton over and over again. Supervised by Prof. Francesc Cano and Prof. Monica Ardanuy the study proves that mechanically recycling pre-consumer cotton is highly viable across at least three successive cycles when using a constant 50:50 virgin blend, maintaining both mean yarn evenness and average tenacity. The data reveal that the most significant drop in yarn evenness and strength happens right after the first cycle, after which the values largely plateau. However, a key challenge remains: while this 50:50 blend ratio effectively keeps overall yarn regularity stable at a macro level, it does not prevent the progressive accumulation of mechanically weak points within the yarn structure. In fact, the parameter most sensitive to cumulative recycling was the tenacity CV%, which rose consistently across all three cycles.

What’s Next? To turn these insights into industrial realities, future work will focus on exploring dynamic blend ratios across cycles, analyzing changes in fibre length, transitioning to industrial-scale machinery, and evaluating performance at the fabric level.

Congrats, Oskar Dickman! 

The WASTE2BUILD project was presented during the 8th Textile Industry and Sustainability Conference in Terrassa, Spain