Journal of Textile Science & Engineering

Hair fibres from a range of domesticated and undomesticated animal species have long provided valuable products for use by the human population. Historically, sheep hair fibre described as ‘wool’, has been an important source of economic wealth for European countries with production surpassed in recent times by Australia and New Zealand. Sheep wool is also an important product of China and South American countries. Other natural animal fibre products and major regions of production include alpaca, llama, vicun˜ a and guanaco (South American camelids: South America), mohair (Angora goats: Southern Africa; Turkey; United States; and Argentina), cashmere (Goats: China; Mongolia; and Iran) and angora (Rabbits: range of countries). The scale of world ‘wool’ production has been estimated at 2.2 million metric tonnes (mt) (van Dam, 2009) with Australian sheep wool contributing in excess of 0.4 million mt .Production of other fibres includes that from alpaca (4056 mt) and llama (3343 mt) in South America and raw cashmere in China (8900 mt) . In terms of utilisation of the raw or partly processed sheep wool product, China is the major international centre of importation (276 700 mt) and processing (359 700 mt). In regard to examples for Europe, approximate values for importation of wool into Italy and the United Kingdom for the year 2000 are given as 150 000 mt, and 90 000 mt, respectively. There is, in addition, industrial and ‘niche market’ use of indigenous animal fibre produced in European countries such as France, Italy (e.g. Biella the Wool Company, 2009) and United Kingdom (British Wool Marketing Board, 2009).

The past 20 years have seen growth in exposure and academic outlets for design scholarship through new journals, special topics sessions and conferences, and PhD programs. Yet, there is a lack of strong published examples of design scholarship in textiles and apparel as designer scholars and administrators still struggle to understand how to conduct, document, and evaluate design scholarship. This issue, long overdue, looks at the current state of design research in our textile and apparel discipline and provides examples that begin to fill the gap in our shared understanding of a way forward.

The sensing/adapting/responding, multifunctionality, low energy, small size and weight, ease of forming, and low-cost attributes of SMART textiles and their multidisciplinary scope offer numerous end uses in medical, sports and fitness, military, fashion, automotive, aerospace, built environment, and energy industries. The research and development for these new and high-value materials crosses scientific boundaries, redefines material science design and engineering, and enhances quality of life and our environment. "Novel SMART Textiles" is a focused special issue that reports the latest research of this field and facilitates dissemination, networking, discussion, and debate.

World fibre production has been rising continuously over last decades and a tremendous increase is expected in the near future. The major portion of fibres goes to the textile industry whose main output streams are apparel and home textiles. With the transformation of these textile products from a basic human need to fashion items, their lifetime before disposal is steadily declining, while at the same time the complexity of their material composition is increasing. As a matter of fact, the amount of disposed items is increasing distinctively and the issue of a proper handling of end-of-life textiles is becoming more important. The objective of this mini review is, first to give a brief overview of the already available textile recycling methods, and subsequently it will discuss innovative developments of new recycling processes in the textile recycling sector. A special focus of this review lies on the emerging field of biochemical fibre recycling processes, which could become a major step on the way to a circular economy in the textile processing chain. Owing to the high selectivity of bio-catalysts, enzymes, these processes could be used to remove a specific fibre material from multi-component textiles. As the complexity of textiles is reduced, the recyclability is increased.

Data science and analytics are attracting more and more attention from researchers and practitioners in recent years. Due to the rapid development of advanced technologies nowadays, a massive amount of real time data regarding flight information, flight performance, airport conditions, air traffic conditions, weather, ticket prices, passengers comments, crew comments, etc., are all available from a diverse set of sources, including flight performance monitoring systems, operational systems of airlines and airports, and social media platforms. Development of data analytics in aviation and related applications is also growing rapidly. This paper concisely examines data science and analytics in aviation studies in several critical areas, namely big data analysis, air transport network management, forecasting, and machine learning. The papers featured in this special issue are also introduced and reviewed, and future directions for data science and analytics in aviation are discussed.