A study to understand the underlying mechanics involved in the forms of knitted garments reveals that it is friction between fibres that allows the knitted fabrics to take on a given form.
- The study, conducted by a trio of physicists from the University of Rennes, Aoyama Gakuin University, and the University of Lyon was published in the Physical Review Letters.
THE EXPERIMENTS: The physicists — Jérôme Crassous, Samuel Poincloux, and Audrey Steinberger — conducted experiments using a nylon yarn and a well-known jersey knit stitch called the stockinette—a technique that involves forming interlocked loops using knitting needles.
- They knitted a piece of fabric using 70x70 stitches and attached it to a biaxial tensile machine.
- The team then used the tensile machine to stretch the piece of fabric in different ways, and then closely examined how it impacted the stitches. They found that the piece of garment did not have a unique shape. By stretching the fabric in different ways, they could cause it to come to rest in different forms, which they call metastable shapes.
- The study revealed that there is no unique shape. Instead, there are many different possible shapes, and these forms are known as “metastable states.”
- The ratios of the length and width of such metastable shapes varied depending on how much twisting was applied, which suggested the fabric was capable of taking on many different metastable shapes.
