The principles of hexagonal cell formation in warp knitted fabric

Abstract

Mesh fabric is widely used for different purposes especially in the technic and medicine. Warp knitting with its fillet interlooping is the most common technology for mesh production. The vast majority of fillet structures has typical mesh macrostructure and provides the wide range of cell's shapes and sizes, which affect the physical-mechanical properties and basic density of knitted fabric. It's possible to change the cell's size from the minimum to the maximum at a constant shape and constant technological conditions of knitting in warp knit fabric with hexagonal cells that is preferred for technical textiles. For this reason, the two tasks have been solved in this research: to establish rules of the hexagonal cells formation in the fillet knit structure and to determine the factors that influence the cells size. The basic principles of formation of hexagonal cells in fillet warp knitted structures have been formulated in this article as a result of the theoretical analysis of geometrical models. The analytical dependences of the cell's size on the number of tricot and chain courses in the interlooping repeat and of the cell's square on the width and height of cell have been defined based on experimental data. They confirm the theoretical positions of this research.