Centre for Material and Fibre Innovation
ITRI
Chris Hurren's aims for his research are straightforward.
He wants to give the woolgrowers who have financed his scholarship value for money.
Coming from both a rural background via a career in the textile industry, he knows exactly what they will be looking for - a better product that will give them a better return.
"My scholarship to do my PhD is through Australian Wool Innovation," he said.
"My attitude is that it is not much use doing research if it cannot be used in a practical way. I guess I have the advantage of having worked on both sides, in industry and in research and that gives me a pretty clear idea of what these sorts of partnerships can achieve."
Chris, the grandson of farmers from Nagambie in rural Victoria, worked as a dyer in the textile industry before taking on the role of lab manager at Deakin University.
He does that full-time, while working on his PhD and also acting as a volunteer, flying fire-spotter for the Country Fire Authority on his days off.
"Yeah on my rostered day off I fly all over Geelong, and as far as Warrnambool, looking for fires," he says.
"Life's not fun unless you fill it up!"
His research too is pretty full, not just one thread, but two, as he aspires to provide his old mates in the textile industries with some practical solutions to their everyday problems.
"I am having a two-pronged look at ways of cleaning wool," he says. "One involves ultra-sonic treatment of wool in the scouring process.
"The other one, probably the more sexy of the two, is my work on developing self-cleaning textiles.
Clothes that clean themselves? Yes the end is nigh for those hard to remove old gravy and sauce stains on your shirt.
"With self-cleaning textiles the idea is to apply a nanocoating of titanium dioxide to the outside of a fabric 50 to 100 nanometres in thickness," says Chris.
"When you walk under UV light it photocatalytically activates the titanium dioxide and it degrades stains. So if you're eating your pie at lunch and you spill some sauce on yourself, the stain won't disappear instantly but over a week or two, it will. It degrades into water and carbon dioxide and floats away.
"Essentially what happens is that the titanium dioxide absorbs the energy from the light and makes free radicals and the free radicals destroy the organic structure of the stain.
"So it doesn't work for dirt, so you will still need your washing machine.
"But the organic structures on which it works include most of your standard contaminants - oil, grease, sauces, red wine."
No more old wives measures - "quick put salt on it" - when guests spill the pinot noir on the Berber, just turn on the light and watch the stain fade!
Chris's work in cleaning wool using ultrasonics is built around extending existing technologies to the fibre industry, as he explained:
"We are taking a traditional system of ultrasonic cleaning like they use in cleaning jewellery. Ultrasonics has an unbelievable power to emulsify fats and oils and also to remove dirt contaminants.
"There are a number of positive outcomes if we can apply this to wool. You could reduce the amount of detergent required, and also get a cleaner and better product.
"When you wash wool it shrinks. When you do that before processing, you get matting or felting, which results in shorter fibres that reduce the quality of the product.
"Ultrasonics is happening at a micro-scale. You don't have the agitation you see in normal wool scouring, so you don't get the matting. No matting means you should get longer fibre lengths.
"The other positive is that you also reduce the amount of chemicals in your waste.
"We are about to start trials on all this now and what I hope to be able to do is a build a small plant, then take it to a manufacturer and say, 'this is how it works, it's up to you now to build a larger working model'."
As "full" as his life is, Chris couldn't be happier than to be working and studying at Deakin.
"I began my under-graduates work at another university before shifting to Deakin," he said. "Everything was just pitched better here. The lecturers were more realistic and the class sizes smaller.
"For my post graduate work, the facilities are excellent. However, for a postgraduate degree you tend to base your decision on where to go on the quality of the supervisor. My supervisor is Xungai Wang, you couldn't ask for anything more."
Chris also loves the cross-pollination of ideas that are the central part of research at the Centre for Material and Fibre Innovation.
"Everyone is part of the group," he said. "We have got fibre people talking to metal people and metal people talking to fibre people and the ideas just flow.
"There's an amazing diversity within the fibre researchers. We have got full blown chemists working alongside someone with a mechanical engineering degree.
"The presentations on a Friday are just brilliant because everybody gets to see what everyone else is doing."
Whether it's with his new colleagues at Deakin, his former ones in the wool industry, or the fellow volunteers with whom he works on his days off, collaboration and co-operation for a greater good are a central part of Chris Hurren's full life.
