FIBR: Fiber Identification Benchmarking with Research-Grade Test Materials (RGTM 10279)

Background

This project is a part of NIST’s Circular Economy Program, whose goal is to leverage expertise in measurement science, standards, and technology to support stakeholders in addressing circular supply chain challenges. This project falls specifically in the textiles focus of the program. Please visit the Circular Economy Textiles page to learn more about our other efforts.

Material recovery systems in the textile industry face significant challenges in rapid and reliable feedstock identification of heterogeneous textile waste streams. Textile sorters are working to integrate Near Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and other tools into their sorting process to increase their throughput, accuracy, and cost competitiveness. However, the lack of well-characterized, known-provenance materials limits the validation of complex sorting algorithms and hinders the development and deployment of efficient sorting technologies.

The Textiles team at NIST has previously held two workshops: Facilitating a Circular Economy for Textiles in September 2021 and Standards Needs for Circular Textiles in October 2023 in collaboration with ASTM and American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists (AATCC). These needs were also discussed in a follow-on article from the 2021 workshop. The first workshop laid the groundwork in capturing the current landscape of textile circularity in the U.S., and the second workshop examined the need for documentary standards. Participants identified “Classifications of textile materials to enable advanced sorting” and “Test methods for rapid identification of textile composition (e.g. fiber content, additives, etc.)” as important needs for enabling the scale up of textile sorting.

In addition to the workshops, the Textiles team has sustained continued outreach and engagement with our stakeholders about their measurement needs. To address the need for high quality data to support textile sorting system design and validation, we released a dataset of NIR spectra of known-provenance and post-consumer fabrics, called NIR-SORT, in September 2024. The further need for reference materials for NIR spectroscopy measurements has been raised repeatedly by both our industry and academic stakeholders.

In the figure above, on the left, a textile is produced. Such textiles may include features such as blended fibers, dyes, finishes, trims/seams, or may be comprised of multiple layers. Any of these components can cause misrecognition and misidentification as the textile flows through a sorting system. This can cause the information about the textile to be incorrect, incomplete, or potentially even not provide a result. Accurate sorting is important to enable next use strategies for textile feedstocks, as contamination such as elastane can cause processing issues, such as entanglement in shredding equipment. While NIR-SORT seeks to assist industry in building robust sorting algorithms through ground truth data, not all sorting systems rely upon NIR spectroscopy. In addition, our industrial stakeholders have indicated that they need to be able to test their equipment with known-provenance physical specimens to ensure continued performance.

Fiber Identification Benchmarking with Research Grade Test Materials (FIBR)

The textile industry is not focused on high reproducibility of precise measurements of textiles; therefore, sourcing fabrics with highly repeatable measurements for research or standards purposes has historically been a challenge. Currently, standard test methods will specify textiles to use in their protocol, such as the multifiber strip from Testfabrics, Inc. in AATCC TM61 or ISO 105-F10. However, there is not currently a standard reference material with spectroscopically-validated, known fiber composition available. To address these needs, we are pleased to announce that we will soon be releasing a set of Research Grade Test Materials (RGTM 10279) to support an Interlaboratory Study (ILS) on textile classification called Fiber Identification Benchmarking with RGTM InterLaboratory Study or FIBRILS. 

NIST will be making this material available free of charge, participants will only need to pay for shipping and handling. Please note- these are not fabrics for personal use. It is for the evaluation of fiber identification methods by textile sorters, researchers, and laboratory professionals through an interlaboratory comparison study. 

Please contact us at fibrils [at] nist.gov (fibrils[at]nist[dot]gov)  if you’re interested in being added to a contact list for notification when FIBRILS is released!

Explore the rest of the Circular Economy program’s Textiles activities.