Engineering Sustainable Textiles: a Bamboo Textile Comparison

This paper delves into a subset of engineering for sustainable development the engineering of sustainable textiles using bamboo. The experiments performed attempt to answer two main questions: (1) what are the differences in textile properties between chemically-manufactured and mechanically-manufactured bamboo textiles? and (2) what are the differences in textile properties between two different species of bamboo? The textile properties examined relate to sustainability: wear and tear (and therefore durability) and moisture wicking (and therefore the need for machine washing and drying). The following are measured for fibre, yarn, and fabric: tear force, breaking force, breaking tenacity, moisture absorption and speed of drying, and surface morphology.