Automated screening processes for the development of sustainable surface treatments

Understanding the structure and properties of substrates such as textiles, and the changes they undergo, is a vital component in developing treatments to improve their resilience and longevity. The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) recently estimated that producing 1 kg of cotton uses up to 20000 litres of water, and that in the UK alone, 300000 tonnes of clothes go to landfill annually.

This project will focus on developing automated processes to characterise the structure and properties of a variety of surfaces to provide a foundation for predicting a material's behaviour from a series of physical measurements. It will explore a variety of characterisation techniques to assess changes in the structure of textiles, how structural changes correlate with macroscopic properties of the material and the influence of treatments on these changes.

We will use these methods to collate data to build an understanding of what kind of chemical properties result in an effective treatment. This has the potential to accelerate the development of effective and sustainable surface treatments.