Entanglement-driven responses through multiscale 3D-printed knits

TL;DR

This paper introduces 3D-printed knitted architectures as programmable, entangled solids with tunable mechanical properties, extending traditional knitting into three dimensions and across scales, enabling novel material designs.

Contribution

It demonstrates that additive manufacturing can create volumetric knits with predictable mechanics, unifying responses across geometries and scales, and introduces the concept of treating knitting as a 3D architected material.

Findings

3D-printed knits exhibit fabric-like and programmable responses.

Volumetric knits' stiffness and dissipation are tunable by pre-strain.

Successfully fabricated the smallest knitted structure to date.

Abstract

For their resilience and toughness, filamentous entanglements are ubiquitous in both natural and engineered systems across length scales, from polymer-chain- to collagen-networks and from cable-net structures to forest canopies. Textiles are an everyday manifestation of filamentous entanglement: the remarkable resilience and toughness in knitted fabrics arise predominately from the topology of interlooped yarns. Yet most architected materials do not exploit entanglement as a design primitive, and industrial knitting fixes a narrow set of patterns for manufacturability. Additive manufacturing has recently enabled interlocking structures such as chainmail, knot and woven assemblies, hinting at broader possibilities for entangled architectures. The general challenge is to treat knitting itself as a three-dimensional architected material with predictable and tunable mechanics across scales. Here, we show that knitted architectures fabricated additively can be recast as periodic entangled solids whose responses are both fabric-like and programmable. We reproduce the characteristic behavior of conventional planar knits and extend knitting into the third dimension by interlooping along three orthogonal directions, yielding volumetric knits whose stiffness and dissipation are tuned by prescribed pre-strain. We propose a simple scaling that unifies the responses across stitch geometries and constituent materials. Further, we realize the same topology from centimeter to micrometer scales, culminating in the fabrication of what is, to our knowledge, the smallest knitted structure ever made. By demonstrating 3D-printed knits can be interpreted both as a traditional fabric, as well as a novel architected material with defined periodicity, this work establishes the dual nature of entangled filaments and paves the way towards a new form of material architectures with high degrees of entanglement.