Kestrel Materials
Otherlab | CA
The Project
Kestrel Materials is developing a thermally adaptive fabric that increases and decreases its thickness depending on the ambient air temperature. This increase in thickness creates air pockets which have a low thermal conductivity, keeping the wearer of the material warmer in cold environments and cooler in warm environments.
My Role
My primary role was to modify an existing 'thread spinner' to streamline the process and ramp up production of the proprietary fabric. This process required iterating on the design to construct it at a lower pricepoint with fewer custom parts.
Along with the design changes came an abundance of system and control issues. To manage this, I performed hundreds of tests to get the conditions just right and wrote software to enhance machine efficiency, consistency, and to monitor machine conditions while unattended.