From Clothing Rations to Fast Fashion: Utilising Regenerated Protein Fibres to Alleviate Pressures on Mass Production

Sustainable methods of practice within the fashion and textile industry (FTI) often strive to employ a circular economy that aims to eliminate waste through the continual use of resources. Complex problems such as waste, consumption, and overproduction are heavily intertwined; the main aim of this paper is to report on research focused on re-examining the potential of food waste streams as a commercially viable and circular source of raw materials for the FTI. Herein, regenerated protein fibres (RPFs) from food production waste streams rich in protein have been chosen as the main topic of focus. RPFs have a rich and relevant history from a local manufacturing perspective during wartime and post-war clothing rationing (1941–1949) in the UK. RPFs were used to meet civilian needs for wool-based textiles as part of a wider series of ‘make do and mend’ strategies designed to manage the consumption of new textile products. However, RPFs demonstrated inferior quality in terms of durability when compared to wool-based textiles, a significant contributing factor to the consequent commercial phasing out of RPFs. In today’s take–make–waste model, the FTI landscape can be defined by speed, from slow (high-quality materials and construction, long-lasting products) to fast (seasonal, disposable, low-quality materials and construction), the latter infamous for dire environmental impacts. A key objective of this research is to review the association of quality and longevity within the context of a local and circular fashion economy in which textile quality and lifecycle analysis are holistically matched to the longevity of the textile, garment, or product to reduce waste across the supply chain.

A Closure for the Virtual Origin of Turbulent Plumes

An isolated source of surface buoyancy, be it a campfire or burning city, gives rise to a turbulent plume. Well above the surface, the plume properties asymptote to the well-known solutions of Morton, Taylor, and Turner (MTT), but a closure is still lacking for the virtual origin. A closure for the virtual origin is sought here in the case of a turbulent plume sustained by a circular source of surface buoyancy in an unstratified and unsheared fluid. In the high Reynolds number limit, it is argued that all such plumes asymptote to a single solution. Direct numerical simulation (DNS) of this solution exhibits a virtual origin located a distance below the surface equal to 1.1 times the radius of the buoyancy source. This solution is compared to the previously used assumption that the MTT plume is fully spun-up at the surface, and that assumption is found to give buoyancies that are off by an order of magnitude. With regards to the citywide firestorm triggered by the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, it is found that the spun-up-at-surface MTT solution would have trapped radioactive soot within about a hundred meters of the surface, whereas the DNS solution presented here corroborates observations of the plume reaching well into the troposphere.

Gravitational microlensing of an elliptical source near a fold caustic

We consider the amplification factor for the luminosity of an extended source near the fold caustic of the gravitational lens. It is assumed that the source has elliptical shape, and the brightness distribution along the radial directions is Gaussian. During the microlensing event the total brightness of all microimages is observed, which changes when the source moves relative to the caustic. The main contribution to the variable component is given by the so-called critical images that arise/disappear at the intersection of the caustic by the source. In the present paper we obtained an analogous formula for elliptical Gaussian source. The formula involves a dependence on the coordinates of the source centre, its geometric dimensions, and its orientation relative to the caustic. We show that in the linear caustic approximation the amplification of the circular and elliptical sources is described by the same (rescaled) formula. However, in the next approximations the differences are significant. We compare analytical calculations of the amplification curves for different orientations of an elliptical source and for a circular source with the same luminosity for the model example.