Smart textiles fabric structure

D knitted textiles have already been widely used as technical textiles in different fields. The future work should be on the development of new 3D knitted structures with more extra functions to meet the requirements of new application fields. For example, warp-knitted spacer fabrics have great structural variations. By using different structures and fibre materials, they have been developed to have various physical functions to be used in different fields, such as cushioning, sound absorption, smart textiles and thermal collection. New potential application fields should be identified first in the future, and then fabric stmctures can be designed to better match the specific applicatimis. 

The textile industry still constitutes one of Europe s most relevant industrial sectors for both the economy and society. The very latest trend in textile and linked industries is to create miscellaneous new products which possess the potential of interacting with the surrounding environment through active feedback. This class of new interactive material is termed intelligent textile structures or smart textiles. In order to make interactive fabrics available at the industrial level it is necessary to apply a multidisciplinary approach. The route to develop and optimise multifunctional material involves in the same way textile engineering and colloid chemistry. The complexity of the production process for modern composite materials is a real challenge to textile engineering but the fundamentals of interfacial and colloid science are indispensable to characterise and control the... 

Various textile structures can be employed to design a garment for embedded wearable technology. Fabric structures such as woven, knitted, braided, non-woven and other textile stmctures are possible, depending on the requirements of the system. Each type of system has its unique properties that can play a major role in the functionality of the system. Most of these types of textile structures are used for electronic textiles, such as embroidery and others. Nevertheless, these structures find uses in many smart textiles used today. 

Metal fibers are mainly used for woven and knitted fabrics. Typical applications of metal fibers are filters (as in polymer melt spinning), antistatic applications (for example, filters, protective clothing), reinforcement structures (tire cord), and also sensors (smart textiles) and architecture (metal fabric fagade). 

Wearable antennas, based on conductive textiles, exploit new flexible and smart structures without affecting the native textile properties (Giddens et al., 2012). To achieve this result, conductive textiles such as Zelt, Flectron and pure copper polyester fabrics are typically used as the radiating elanent, while nonconductive textiles are used as substrates (Rais et al., 2009). The geometry of an antenna developed for body wearable appUcations is shown in Fig. 4.21. 

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