Science is Fun Fridays!

 Following up on yesterday's fashion which included knitwear, I found an interesting article about the science of knitting.

Knitted fabrics show completely different properties than their individual strands of yarn.  These fabrics are considered to be a metamaterial, whose elasticity is an emergent property.  

Scientists want to understand knitting configurations, where different knits and purls vary the degree of elasticity.  This could help engineers develop artificial tissues, e-textiles, and even aerodynamic lineations.  These can be modified to absorb and eventually store the kinetic energy produced by the weaver's motions.

The elastic energy of the yarn depends on the amount of deformation in the knit.  As the yarn bends, it stretches and loses a large amount of energy.  As the dimension of the knit gets smaller, the bending energy increases, providing a relationship between energy and the interlinking parameters.

Geometrical models focus on the geometry of the stitches and the dimensional properties of the resulting fabric.  They manipulate the parameter of each stitch before the crossing of yarns.

Mechanical models focus on the elasticity of yarn and the topology of the resulting fabric, creating a sort of coding language.  The stitch patterns provide certain programmable codes for the geometry and elasticity, which allows researchers (and designers) to create knitted structures with variable shapes and properties.

Science
Knot theory