Designing Knitted Fabrics with Programmable Properties

Programmable materials that are engineered to be highly dynamic in form and function have attracted research interests in the most recent decade. We believe that knitted fabrics can also be programmable and yield an enormous design space to explore: in addition to varying the fiber mechanical properties, there is a whole gamut of topological relations for how the fibers are knitted together. Here, we develop a simulation framework for modeling fabrics at the level of individual fibers, which we quantitatively validate against experiment. We use this framework to systematically explore how the macroscopic mechanical properties of knitted fabrics depend on the knit topology. We consider both fabrics made of a single knit topology, plus composite fabrics where multiple knit topologies are present. Our framework allows us to understand the interplay of knit topology, geometry, and elasticity, and permits the design of knitted fabrics with programmable properties.