Suman Thakur

By Suman Thakur

Shape memory polymer (SMP) is a genre of smart materials which demonstrate a capability to fix in the temporarily programed shape and to recover the original shape upon exposure to external stimuli. Such unique and amazing properties of SMPs are applied to develop smart textiles by incorporating SMP into the fabric. Various types of stimuli-responsive SMPs such as thermal, light, pH, and moisture have been used in textiles for enhancing or attaining some smart properties. The integration of SMPs in fabric provides many fascinating and improved properties such as good aesthetic appeal, comfort, textile soft display, smart controlled drug release, fantasy design, wound monitoring, smart wetting properties and protection against extreme variations in environmental conditions. In this chapter, we discussed different types of SMP used for this purpose, their functions, and applications in textiles with their potential applications in the near future.

Part of the book: Textiles for Advanced Applications

By Suman Thakur and Jinlian Hu

Shape memory polymer (SMP) is a stimuli-responsive material with the ability to alter a programmed shape to its original shape upon triggering of an appropriate stimulus. For the past decades, SMP has dragged much interest in material field owing to its various and versatile applications. One archetypal SMP is polyurethane, which has a wide-ranging transition temperature for its shape recovery, retraction temperatures, inherent soft-hard segments, a high recoverable strain (up to 400%), high control of the softening, favorable and tunable physical properties, and so on. This chapter emphasizes on the raw materials required for the synthesis of shape memory polyurethane (SMPU), the principle of shape memory function, the design of protocol of SMPU, and their applications with future directions.

Part of the book: Aspects of Polyurethanes