Directing and Simulating Flow Properties in Large-Scale Weft-Knitted Fabrics

Weft-knitted fabrics offer significant potential for smart textile applications due to their versatile and programmable structure. However, the lack of effective computational simulation tools limits the precise design of large-scale fabrics with targeted physical properties, such as liquid flow control. Building upon our previous flow property design method with small-scale yarn topology graphs, this paper presents significant advancements toward large-scale, flow-controlled fabric design. We improve the computational efficiency of the flow diffusion simulations, devise tiling methods to assemble 10×10 optimized basic swatches into 100×100 middle-scale fabrics, and further scale the approach to construct 1000×1000 large-scale stitch patterns suitable for clothing-related applications. Furthermore, we propose flow design strategies enabling complex flow routing within fabrics. Our results demonstrate that it is feasible to engineer knitted fabrics with user-specified flow properties, offering new possibilities for smart textiles, wearable sensors, and comfort management systems.