The dyeing of fabrics by using the extracts from trunk, empty fruit bunch, mesocarp and palm kernel shell (PKS) of oil palm trees was tried and the relationships between dyeing conditions and dyeability were studied. It was found that the PKS extracts obtained by the extraction with water dye silk fabric brownish orange colour and they show highest dyeability among the extracts. The dyeing results for silk fabric by PKS extracts with an increase in the amount of extracts in the dyeing solution do not show general dyeing behaviour. The hue of dyed silk changes and the lightness decreases and slightly increases with an increase in the supplied amount of extracts. It indicates that the colourants in PKS extracts may be oxidised and they change chemically during dyeing process and/or the colourant molecules might form aggregates and the composition of dyestuffs adsorbed on fibre varies. The dyeability of silk by PKS extracts increases with increasing dyeing time and temperature. Furthermore, it was revealed that wool, cotton, ramie and nylon are also dyed by PKS extracts. This study has clarified for the first time that the extracts from PKS of oil palm trees work as a useful dye.

Uninterrupted vital-sign monitoring is one of the application field of the so-called “smart textiles”from the increasing demand for health care demands. Most of the so-called smart textiles have been employed conductive fibers for sensing and signal transformation, but very few employed fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor, which can be used as “multi vital sign sensor”. Although the demands for blood glucose monitoring is increasing, no smart textile has been investigated from the viewpoint. We demonstrated at the first time in this paper that FBG sensor could sense blood glucose level and could be expected manner in the textile form. We installed the FBG sensor on the subjectʼs wrist and measured pulse wave. The subject had a meal as a glucose load during the measurement. As pulse wave pattern data from FBG sensor system includes information about several other vital signs, we isolated blood glucose information by using hierarchical neural network analysis. The isolated data provided a calibration curve with an extremely high correlation coefficient to the blood glucose. The calculated values are evaluated by dedicated indicator, and we found there are only small error which we can ignore clinically. Comparing with the former studies, we efficiently achieved feature extraction, and the stability of measurement was improved. Although the result represents the first successful method for realizing more accurate non-invasive blood glucose measurement systems aim to smart textile, this result is good enough even at this stage, and we are expecting for practical use in near future. The successful results lead the development of smart textiles for the uninterrupted non-invasive measurement.

Crystallization behavior and metastable amorphous structure of polycarbonate (PC) slowly cast from tetrahydrofuran (THF) solution was investigated by Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy. The amorphous structure of PC changed to a different structure under the influence of THF as a polar solvent. We call this different structure metastable amorphous, and similar structures have been found in several polymers other than PC. A metastable amorphous has a different conformation from a normal amorphous structure and becomes a crystal nucleus. That structure was preserved on the surface of alumina nanoparticles by the interaction between different substances. The metastable amorphous preserved on the nanoparticles has a new Tg (We called L-Tg) at 0~ 60̊C, which is lower temperature than normal Tg. Furthermore, these structures were crystallized by a short annealing at 120 ̊C. We report this metastable amorphous structure of PC and its transformation into crystals.