Characterizing Interwoven: Testing and Modeling Root-Textiles

Interwoven refers to material structures made by growing plant roots into man-made patterns. Originally developed as an art piece to demonstrate root intelligence and bring attention to human-nature relations, Interwoven shows the potential to disrupt various commercial industries, especially as textile-based natural fiber reinforcements for composite materials. The artist that created Interwoven, Amsterdam-based Diana Scherer, started a collaboration with the TU Delft Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering to help further develop Interwoven from an art piece to a sustainable material for products design. Following the Material Driven Design method (Karana, et al., 2015), two students have identified materials experience opportunities created by Interwoven materials, the mechanical properties and internal structure of Interwoven are still not fully understood. This study tackles the challenge of performing a technical characterization on Interwoven structures in an effort to correlate processing parameters to its structure, properties, and performance. It is known from past works that Interwoven is fragile and “weak”, but a quantified value for these terms serves as a point of comparison with other materials in the market. To determine these values, a series of tensile tests were performed on grids with a simple square pattern. Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (DMA) tests performed on single roots proved that the amalgamation of roots that make up an Interwoven structure do not efficiently transfer tensile loads since the tensile strength and elastic moduli of Interwoven samples were nearly two orders of magnitude lower than those of a single root. Load transfer between roots was improved through the design of natural fiber-reinforced composites (NFRCs). The (bio)-polymer matrix used for these NFRCs was made up of agar gel, which improved the tensile properties of Interwoven samples, but was still lower than the single root. A full characterization o
Integrated Product Design