Engineered Warp Knit Auxetic Fabrics

Abstract

Auxetic textiles comprise a class of extraordinary materials that increase in size when stretched and are being considered in many applications of technical textiles. Sustained efforts to fabricate auxetic fabric structures are sparse and the use of auxetic materials has been limited because of problems with deploying them in their fabricated forms. Auxetic materials based on fibers and fabrics may be able to circumvent these and other limitations. Thus, the use of auxetic fibers in an engineered textile structure can be facilitated by the development of cost effective, productive processes in which large quantities of textile materials exhibit the very unusual, interesting and useful property of becoming wider when stretched and thinner when compressed. Such a process will revolutionize the technical textiles and protective clothing industry. Our thrust in this research is to combine our knowledge of geometry and fabric structural characteristics to engineer auxetic textiles and to determine the properties of such auxetic textile fabrics. Our efforts to produce auxetic knit structures from non-auxetic yarns are described in this paper.