Warp Structures Give Weft Knitting Ultra-Dimensionality

What does innovation look like at Fabdesigns? Advanced Ultra- Dimensionally Knitted textiles with nearly zero waste.

Imagine next-generation apparel, footwear, or medical devices that adapt as we move through different environments. Consider 3D and 4 D composites with integrated strengthening strands, data cables, and other structures built right into preforms, making layup consistent, quick, and repeatable for everything, from light weight electric vehicles to drones, and surfboards.

We would need to embed materials in multiple directions to optimize performance.

Adding a warp fabric element on a flat knitting (V-bed) machine poses significant difficulties, including challenges in providing a weft knit warp element for top feeding strands into the machine, essentially creating the effect of a warp and Fabdesigns has spent several years and many iterations perfecting such a machine modification.

Fabdesigns knitting master, Bruce Huffa, has perfected the hardware and software, while his wife textile engineer, Concetta Huffa has streamlined the trajectory, drag, and friction of the material through machinery, preprocessing, and after processes for utilizing knitting as additive manufacturing as a reliable and consistent system of mass production.

In the fabrics shown here, Fabdesigns continues to optimize doing more performance function with less materials yet making new innovations as easy as possible to implement, which is why we created a reversible system that adapts existing equipment giving the machines superpowers to make new things. 

Current developments and production at Fabdesigns combine a trifecta of patents to take flat knitting as well as textile engineering to the next level of multifunctionality while continuing our mission of being tremendously mindful of sustainability.  Their introduction of a true warp knitting structure on a flat knitting machine where the machine can manipulate multiple warp structures along a completely knitted panel in the knitting process creates many options for embedding conductive strands for data, energy, light, and heat in automotive, aerospace composite panels, and interiors.

The same technology adds ligaments to soft goods like yoga wear and adds auxetic materials to medical and sports gear for rehab and training. The warp varies multiple knitting types in zones (inlay, knit, tuck, intarsia, floating), depending on the type of performance characteristics required in a particular zone and the specific needs of the material processing. 

Over the past several years, Fabdesigns has created the ability to provide multiple weft-knit warp insertion reinforcement configurations in one or more areas of a weft-knitted textile. Each warp insertion is also able to create novel constructions independent of other warp structures on the machine. The weft knitted textile may be one or more layers or even built by a series of inserts.

At the core of this innovative framework are five general sources of value adds to transform existing products and add whole platforms of new technologies.

1.  Non-brand specific technology introducing multiple warps to fabric consistently and repeatedly.

2. Reversible technology that returns stock machinery to OEM in minutes.

3. The machine manipulates all the warp strands exclusively, eliminating human errors, and manual labor

4. Warp strands coordinate in zones, layers, and advanced Ultra-Dimensional Knitted Structures

5. Unspooling stiff materials consistently to maintain consistent quality, resistance, and strength ratios through mass production of a handful to over a million units

The Fabdesigns' patented warp invention is a reversible and non-damaging or permanent modification to a flat knitting machine that when combined with several of the Memminger-Iro MTD unspooling devices, creates highly-advanced functional hybrid textiles. These functions can be mechanical functions that combine the stretch characteristics of knitted fabrics with the stability of woven textiles, suited to various technical applications. They may also be electronic functions, ballistic functions, aesthetic placements or other geometrically or anatomically arranged warp structures combined with stitch structures.

Warp insertion, vertically, diagonally, overlapping, and with multiple material types and further expands the capability of the machinery to produce two-dimensionally and three-dimensionally shaped fiber reinforcing composite preforms shaped to the mold directly on the machine. Each preform can be made up of one or more layers, each having a different warp configuration to embed different characteristics into specific layers for functional purposes.

Reversible machine technologies modify stock machinery and enable the unique capabilities for using weft knitting as additive manufacturing.  This means that the technologies are not brand specific and may be adaptable to a variety of knitting equipment.

In contrast to other available tools on the textile market, Fabdesigns 4D, 5D and now Ultra Dimensionally Knitted  (UDK) additive technologies sets a new bar for technical innovation and allows CAD data to be prepared as intelligent, exact geometry for the next generation of knitting innovations. 

Current methods of knitting carbon fiber and other fiber reinforcing textiles, integrating stainless steel, wire, heating elements, chain, fiber optic, auxetic, thermos-coupling wires, braids, aramids, para-aramids, chain, basalt, insulated fiber-optics, insulated wire, silicon rubber, or other specialized materials, pose challenges to the ‘depackaging’ and feeding of those materials into a conventional knitting machine utilizing standard OEM stop motions and standard OEM feeders. 

Currently, the only practical alternative is using one of two unspooling devices from either of two machine builders, depending on which machine type the user is utilizing, and then in the case of one machine builder, only a maximum of two devices  can be mounted on supplemental racking systems that take up the entire top of the machine,  or in the case of the other one large unit mounted on the floor to the side of the machine. This limits the number of strands of these specialized materials able to be used in weft knitted fabric let alone a warp structure. These systems are also brand specific, expensive, and cumbersome to reverse.

This is especially true in knitted support fabrics, which are widely used for surgical implantations, such as support mesh,  artificial ligaments, and heart support structures. Fabdesigns’ invention allows the innovation of numerous types of textiles that meet the many ISO-13485 class 1 to class 3 requirements in terms of strength, flexibility, durability and stability, making flat knitting machines highly suitable for white room manufacturing environments. 

According to the most comprehensive and current engineering standards for three-dimensional knitting, adding warp structures to weft knit fabrics, and especially shaped fabrics creates a whole new world of flat knitted products. Blending different fibers and being able to dose them horizontally, vertically, and diagonally as well as overlapping them in small or large areas to support, enhance, and even dampen vibration is now possible. This is a significant advancement in reinventing many types of products from fiber-reinforced composites, medical devices, footwear and even yoga wear.

Each warp structure is integrated as part of unitary knitted construction.  One or more warp structures are integrated and completely formed and constructed by the machinery.  Each warp strand is completely manipulated into a fabric base structure, or any additionally knitted layer, layer portion, component, appendage, or fabricated ply entirely by the machine, and each layer, layer portion, component, appendage, or ply can also be configured by the knitting machine in the same knitting process.

Fabdesigns’ patented method of introducing a warp structure to a weft knitting machine and the fabric-making process on a V-bed flat knitting machine creates a unitary construction made by the machine, in the same way, each time. Each warp incorporated one or more materials and embeds them into one or more weft and warp stitch structures. Each warp can be independent of each other or overlap for specific technical purposes. Each stitch structure has a unique set of mechanical properties derived from the properties of the materials chosen, the tension exerted by various knitting machine parts on the material, and how the materials interlace and interloop with each other in a variety of directions. 

Fabdesigns’ patented Ultra-Dimensionally Knitted components may also incorporate inserts mechanically or manually put into place, such as hardware, foam, wiring, fiber optics, printed circuit boards, computing chips, heating elements and other materials placed into the pockets, channels, welt tunnels, gores, voids, and other structural and functional knitted constructions to provide support, stability, cooling heating, e-textile and or smart performance characteristics. Warp structures can also intersect, connect to, frame, and otherwise interact with the integrated structures or placed inserts.