Question

Classify the following fibers as natural or synthetic: nylon, wool, cotton, silk, polyester, jute.

Answer 1

Hint- This question demands for the brief explanation for the following terms asked in the question. As stating each explanation with all the important points with also structure (if any) would help in deriving the required answer.

Complete step-by-step answer:
Natural fibers-
Natural fibers can be considered as those fibers which are extracted from the natural sources like animals, plants etc. Natural fibers may also be matted into sheets of paper or felt. We can use it as a part of composite materials, where fiber orientation is affecting properties.
Examples would be like wool, cotton, silk.
Jute is a flowering plant that can grow up to 1-4 meters in length. Jute is quite strong, not easily fibrillated or bleached. Jute has a wide range of applications – it can be used to make products such as rope, twine, rugs, chair covers, hessian cloth and food grade bags for cereals and sugar.
Wool is a textile fiber made from sheep and other animals, including cashmere and mohair from goats, qiviut from muskoxen, hide and fur clothing made from bison, angora from rabbits, and other types of camelid wool. Wool is made of protein and a small percentage of lipids.
Cotton is a soft , fluffy staple fiber that grows around the seeds of Gossypium cotton plants in the mallow family of the Malvaceae. It's almost pure cellulose, but again. The seed dispersal of the cotton bolls will increase under natural conditions.
Silk comes from the thread with silk worms, a little at a time. Harvesting silk threads is very time-consuming, and it takes a lot of worms to make sufficient silk to make a cloth that makes it very expensive. The simple answer is that it is high because people have to farm it in order to create genuine quality of silk.

Synthetic fibers-
They are fibers made by humans through chemical synthesis, as opposed to natural fibers that are directly derived from living organisms. They are the result of extensive research by scientists to improve natural animal and plant fibers. In general, synthetic fibers are produced by the extrusion of fiber-forming materials through spinnerets, which form a fiber. They are called synthetic or artificial.
Examples would be like nylon, polyester and jute.
Nylon is a generic name for a family of synthetic polymers based on aliphatic or semi-aromatic polyamides. Nylon is a thermoplastic silk material that can be melted into fibers, film or shapes. It consists of replicate amide-linked units similar to peptide-linked protein bonds.
Polyester is a synthetic fiber derived from coal, air, water and oil. Developed in a 20th-century laboratory, polyester fibers are formed by a chemical reaction between acid and alcohol. In this reaction, two or more molecules combine to make a large molecule whose structure repeats over its length. Polyester fibers can form very stable and strong molecules.

Note- Synthetic fibers are more durable than most natural fibers and will readily pick-up different dyes. In addition, many synthetic fibers offer consumer-friendly features such as stretching, waterproofing and stain resistance. Sunlight, moisture, and human skin oils cause all the fibers to disintegrate and wear away. Natural fibers may be used for high-tech applications, for instance automotive composite components. Compared to glass fiber reinforced composites, natural fiber composites have advantages such as lower density, better thermal insulation and reduced skin irritation.