b S Supporting Information N owadays, graphene is a superstar material in many fields including material science, physics, chemistry, electronics, and biology. 1À3 In addition to the high Young's modulus, strength and thermal conductivity that are comparable to those of carbon nanotubes (CNTs), 4À6 it possess a largely extended two-dimensional (2D) area and distinctive electronic properties. 7,8 Its superior mechanical, thermal, electronic, optical, and chemical properties ensure numerous applications in composites, renewable energy generation and storage, chemical sensors, catalysts, etc. In particular, graphene is believed to be the most promising candidate for replacing silicon in future electronic applications. 9À11

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Auxetic materials are a kind of non-conventional materials having negative Poisson’s ratio. They laterally expand when stretched or laterally shrink when compressed. Compared to conventional materials, auxetic materials have a number of enhanced properties that could be very interesting for some special applications. This paper reviews the latest achievements in auxetic materials, including their properties, structures and applications. A special discussion on their potential applications in textiles is also made. It is expected that this review could provide some useful information for the future development of auxetic textile materials.

Cushioning materials generally absorb kinetic mechanical energy under compression actions at a relatively constant stress over a large range of displacement. However, cushioning materials widely used today are polyurethane (PU) foams with low moisture transmission. As a new class of three-dimensional textile structures, warp-knitted spacer fabrics not only have much better moisture transmission property than PU foams, but also have the similar cushioning performance if appropriate structural parameters are adopted. This paper reports an experimental study on the compression behavior of a series of warp-knitted fabrics made for cushioning applications. These fabrics were produced on a double-needle bar warp knitting machine of gauge 18 by varying different structural parameters including spacer yarn inclination angle and fineness, fabric thickness, and outer layer structure. Both the compression stress-strain curves and energy efficiency diagrams from the testing results were used to analyze the compression behavior of these fabrics and the effect of each structural parameter. The results indicate that warp-knitted spacer fabrics are an ideal class of the energy absorbers for cushioning applications and their energy-absorption capacity can easily be tailored to meet specific end-use requirements by simply varying their structural parameters with the help of efficiency diagrams.

Bamboo fibers are a new kind of natural materials which have a big potential application in textile field due to some of their particular properties. However, high crystallinity and orientation structure can result in some undesirable properties and this will limit their further applications as textile materials. As a common used way, mercerization was adapted to treat bamboo fibers in this work in order to improve their undesirable properties. X-ray diffraction (XRD) was used to characterize their microstructure after treatment with NaOH. The amount of cellulose II and the crystallinity index based on the XRD results were calculated for the evaluation of the effectiveness of the different treatment conditions, such as alkali concentration, mercerization duration and temperature, as well as tension applied to the fibers during mercerization, on the transformation degree of cellulose I to cellulose II and decrystallization of the mercerized bamboo fibers. It has been found that each condition has different effects and that the greatest effectiveness of crystal lattice conversion and decrystallization could be achieved with such mercerization condition: 16 % alkali concentration, 10 minutes of mercerization at 20 o C without tension applied to the fibers.