Textiles Faculty Member Receives NSF CAREER Award

Assistant Professor Rong Yin is one of the newest recipients of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) prestigious CAREER Award.

These grants are part of the Early Career Faculty Development Program and are awarded to tenure-track assistant professors who demonstrate strong potential to become leaders in their areas of research and education. 

Yin anticipates receiving up to $500,000 by the grant’s estimated end date in 2030. 

Advancing sustainable textile manufacturing with hemp

Within the first five years of hemp becoming a legal crop in North Carolina, the state registered 1,500 hemp growers and 1,200 hemp processors. With this increased access to domestically-grown hemp, textile researchers see an opportunity to further expand hemp fiber’s industry presence in the industry. 

Why? Scientists believe hemp fibers could have a lower environmental impact than more commonly used fibers. Using hemp fibers avoids the petroleum present in most synthetic fibers. Hemp also requires less water to grow than cotton does, making it a more sustainable choice for textiles (source).

Despite its potential, hemp continues to be a challenging material to process into textiles, mostly due to its inherent properties and the limitations of existing processing technologies. Hemp fibers are naturally stiff, brittle and lacking in crimp. This makes them difficult to spin into yarns compared to cotton or wool. These properties lead to fiber breakage, poor twist uptake and weak cohesion, resulting in inconsistent, low-performance yarns. 

There is limited understanding of how hemp fiber behavior interacts with key spinning parameters, especially within the spinning triangle, where alignment and tension are critical. Most studies focus on chemical treatments or blending, with little attention to system-level modifications or process optimization. Moreover, the sustainability of large-scale hemp yarn production remains largely unexamined.

Yin’s will use his CAREER grant to conduct problem-solving research in the following areas: 

1. Introducing a modified spinning process that leverages wetting to improve fiber cohesion for enhanced yarn structure.
2. Establishing a data-driven framework for optimizing hemp yarn spinning by quantifying the relationships between the processing parameters, spinning triangle and yarn quality.
3. Exploring fiber dynamics in hemp yarns through AI-assisted micro-CT segmentation for detailed structural insights.
4. Conducting life cycle assessments for hemp yarns and textiles to understand more about their environmental footprint.

This research has the potential to have impacts beyond the textile industry. Yin plans to integrate his findings into curriculum updates, education events and research opportunities for students from middle school through graduate school. He also believes that improvement and growth in domestic hemp manufacturing will contribute to more opportunities for skilled labor in the U.S.

A powerful partnership

Yin will develop these solutions in collaboration with The NSF Textile Innovation Engine in North Carolina. This National Science Foundation (NSF) Regional Innovation Engine is a collaboration of The Industrial Commons, NC State and other key regional partners.