| NSF Org: |
CMMI Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation |
| Recipient: |
|
| Initial Amendment Date: | August 8, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 8, 2015 |
| Award Number: | 1538593 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Rich Malak
CMMI Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation ENG Directorate for Engineering |
| Start Date: | August 15, 2015 |
| End Date: | July 31, 2018 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $150,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $150,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
|
| History of Investigator: |
|
| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
201 PRESIDENTS CIR SALT LAKE CITY UT US 84112-9049 (801)581-6903 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
|
| Primary Place of Performance: |
School of Computing, 50 S. Centr Salt Lake City UT US 84112-9205 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
|
| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
|
| Parent UEI: |
|
| NSF Program(s): | ESD-Eng & Systems Design |
| Primary Program Source: |
|
| Program Reference Code(s): |
|
| Program Element Code(s): |
|
| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.041 |
ABSTRACT
Knitted structures are widely used in textile production. The intricate interlocking of yarn loops using numerous different types of stitching rules allows knitted structures to naturally take 3D shapes that exhibit substantial flexibility even if the underlying yarn material is barely stretchable. These properties combined with new forms of yarn and modern automated knitting machines open up new avenues for general purpose 3D fabrication well beyond traditional, knitted garments. However, the existing computer aided design methods and tools for knitted structures are suitable only for simple 2D patterns. This award supports fundamental research to the needed knowledge for the modeling of 3D knitted structures that will enable rapid design and production of 3D surfaces with drastically different physical properties as compared to other forms of customized fabrication, such as 3D printing. The results from this research will benefit the U.S. economy and society with potential applications in numerous fields including biomedical, healthcare, furniture, automotive, and aerospace industries. The inherent multi-disciplinary nature of this project will broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in engineering research and positively impact education.
A rich variety of knitting operations and stitch types allow for the production of complex 3D surfaces. However, the methods and tools for determining a stitch pattern for a 3D surface with desired geometry and properties are primitive. Since the natural shape of a particular stitch depends of the stitches around it, existing computer aided design methods for rigid materials are not applicable. This research is to fill the knowledge gap in predicting the natural 3D shape of a knitted structure formed by different types of stitches with different configurations. The research team will explore computer aided design interfaces for specifying the knitting operations to produce a desired 3D surface, conduct experiments with knitted structures to identify the natural 3D deformations induced by different stitch patterns, establish rules for predicting these deformations, and develop a physics-based simulation model for computing the natural shape of knitted structures.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
Note:
When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external
site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a
charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from
this site.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The primary goal of this project has been completing the necessary first steps for retargeting knitting-based production as a general-purpose fabrication tool. Knitting is a commonly used technique in textile production. One of its most important properties is that it allows producing 3D structures using the right types of stitches to control the natural shape of a knitted surface. Together with new forms of materials that could be used as a substitute for yarn and the modern knitting machines that can automatically build knitted structures, opens up a whole new avenue for general purpose 3D fabrication. The main obstacle, however, was the fact that there was no established methodology for specifying 3D knitted structures in a general-purpose computer-aided design interface. The main goal of this project was to take the necessary first steps for retargeting the process of knitting as a general-purpose mechanism for the fabrication of 3D structures.
This project led to significant advancements in computer-aided design methods for knit structures. In particular, a new representation of knit structures was developed along with a computer-aided design framework that is capable of modeling complex knit artifacts, a new algorithm was designed for extracting step-by-step knitting instructions from the representation we developed for fabricating the designed knit model, and a fully-automated algorithm was developed for generating knit structures that can form the 3D shape of any given arbitrary model, which was previously a challenging and tedious manual task that required numerous manual iterations. Furthermore, interactive rendering methods were developed for visualizing knit structures with fiber-level detail, involving billions of line segments with complex lighting computations on modern GPUs, including self-shadows of fibers and occlusion of ambient light. Moreover, GPU-based data structures and algorithms were developed for high-performance simulations of complex volumetric elements, including, but not limited to, knit structures.
The funding provided by this project was primarily used for supporting one graduate student, who worked on this research project, including developing the custom software tools needed, testing the methods we introduced, preparing knit artifacts for validating the modeling framework we designed, and writing academic papers that describe the details of our technical contributions.
As a part of the activities of this project we also released a database of digital knit models for aiding related research efforts by others. Models in this database have already been used in multiple academic publications by other researchers. Furthermore, we released the source code of the software we developed for high-performance simulations of complex volumetric elements.
Last Modified: 10/03/2018
Modified by: Cem Yuksel
Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.
