Inverse Design of Mechanical Responses in Programmable Knitted Fabrics

Knitted fabrics that are engineered to be compliant and multi-functional have been applied in many applications, such as wearable devices, e-textiles and soft robotics. In order to optimize the behavior of knitted fabrics, we develop a yarn-level mechanical simulation framework to study the structure--response relationship on the representative unit of all basic knitted structures. We use this framework to explore the design space of knitted fabrics that can be programmed with multiple representative unit structures and with varying mechanical material properties, such as elastic stiffness and bending stiffness. Our framework allows us to perform inverse design efficiently and robustly.