Garments elongation improvement: The use of digital fabrication technology to develop rotational and re-entering auxetic designs on fabrics

The usage of auxetic patterns is growing in different industries from aeronautics to fashion. However, the development of these structures in fabrics for garments is still recent and there are few businesses using these technologies to enhance common garments. We propose to test modified fabrics with laser cut of the patterns for improving its elongation properties.

Since there are many kinds of fabrics used in the fashion industry, abrasion and elastic recovery were the main features to be considered for choosing standard clothes fabrics. Looking to test fabrics that could represent most of the kind of fabrics in the market 3 were selected as they fit the properties mentioned and were classified as rigid, suede and semi rigid fabrics respectively

The design of the pattern was extracted from a research on auxetic patterns on metamaterials and tested each fabric to choose one, depending on its behavior, that can be used in a garment.

The tensile strength and elongation were tested giving elongation ratios from over 100% and revealing different resistances in the samples depending on the direction of the pattern and the type of fabric.