Non-Technical Summary

Textiles are everywhere: anchoring the $1.3 trillion fashion industry, their application extends far beyond to the automotive, furniture, architectural, sports, aeronautical, defense, and myriad engineering industries. Prototyping new textiles and garments is slow and expensive; the fashion industry spends $10 billion annually on this alone.

The advent of additive manufacturing technologies (''3D printing'') presents an exciting new avenue for next-generation textile products. Novel hardware and software techniques will radically expand the gamut of textile products: At the micro-level, designs will offer precise control of mechanical, optical, and electrical characteristics such as aerodynamic drag, adhesion, heat regulation, friction, elasticity, porosity, density, conductivity, and visual appearance. At the macro-level, designs will enable products with spatially-varying material properties, curved textiles that cannot be cut out of flat panels, and complex composite assemblies difficult or impossible to fabricate via traditional tailoring. These designs will enable incorporation of microtechnologies such as embedded microsensors in ''smart textiles'' and energy generation/storage harnessing the human body.

These advances will enable design and fabrication of garments that are precisely customized for individual wearers, and specialized to mission-critical applications spanning health, engineering, transportation, and defense. Engineers will design new types of garments that fit more snugly, glide more easily, fasten more securely, and retain more body heat. Patients will benefit from customized diabetic compression stockings, injury- and patient-specific immobilizing supports, and personalized textile fittings for prosthetics. Consumers will enjoy the first steps toward ''smart garments'' that ''breathes'' and adjusts to environmental changes such as heat, wind or humidity; integrated conductive circuits will harness the body's energy to repower mobile devices. Rescue and defense professionals will benefit from personalized mission-specific high performance gear, designed with fine-tuned control over drag, friction, and visual appearance, etc. Automotive passengers, athletes, school children, and many others will enjoy the safety benefits of personalized garments with integrated padding with improved safety characteristics.

Technical Summary

The proposed research will create the first complete hardware/software pipeline for design and printing of computational textiles. The investigators will seek a deep understanding of: (1) general representations for textile meta-materials (e.g., their internal structure and material composition) spanning the broad flexibility of additive manufacturing; (2) accurate, efficient simulation methods that predict behavior of textile designs; (3) streamlined design processes facilitated by software systems with intuitive, interactive user interfaces incorporating simulation codes; (4) functional specification languages and algorithms for interpreting specifications via 3D printers; (5) investigation into designs for high-resolution 3D printer hardware, with (6) compatible printing materials accommodating a broad range of textile micro-structure, mechanical, thermal, and optical properties. To maximize industrial impact, the investigators will release the entire software and hardware architecture as public open source.