Question: How did you manage to combine Physics and Textiles together in your work?

Rhys Archer answered on 16 Jun 2015:

I work with carbon fibre materials – which are a technical textile. These a textile materials that are built for purpose, not for how they look like fashion or interior textiles. Its really important to know how a technical textile works and its properties for my work – and this comes from studying technical textiles at university and learning about how it is made, what chemical structures are in place, what this means for its structure and how that affects it behaviour. I use Physics looking at the carbon fibre mechanical properties, and how it behaves when are trying to break it. Physics is really important for fracture mechanics, which is looking at how things break, and what energy it takes to break them. I have to use both my textiles knowledge and physics knowledge to understand what happens when we try to break carbon fibre composites and how we can improve them!