The area of smart textiles has recently attracted more and more attention. One of the challenges in this domain is the development of textile sensors, such as textile electrodes, pressure sensors, elongation sensors, etc., mostly containing conductive yarn and/or conductive coating. One possibility to build a textile elongation sensor which can, for example, be utilized as a breathing sensor in a smart shirt, is using knitted fabrics created from conductive yarns, which often show a strong dependence of the electric resistance on the elongation. Due to the typical wearing out of knitted fabrics, however, the time-dependent behavior of a stretched fabric must also be taken into account. The article thus shows the results of elongation-dependent and time-dependent resistance measurements on knitted fabrics, produced from different yarns in various structures and stitch dimensions, elongated in different orientations with respect to the course direction. The results of our study show that full cardigan with medium stitch size is better suited for use as an elongation sensor than double face fabrics or other stitch sizes. These findings are not influenced by the stainless steel fraction in the conduction yarn, while mixing this yarn with a non-conductive one causes undesired signal deviations.

An empirical survey was conducted, manually evaluating the relative haptic preference of patterns in weft knitting for winter garments in Mönchengladbach, Germany. Thirty-six patterns were compared in a blind test using ranking orders with respect to six primary hand values (thickness, softness, warmth, weight, stiffness, and smoothness) and general preference for winter garments by 35 participants. Traits of popular patterns included softness and smoothness as well as tucked stitches, rib structures, and float stitches on the surface. On the other hand, unpopular patterns included lace, purl stitches, and ripples.

Understanding the relaxation processes of knitted fabrics is of importance for knitting companies as well as in basic research. This article examines the new approach of relating the relaxation processes to the percentages of stitches, tucks, and floats in weft knitted structures, showing that especially the number of tucks strongly influences the relaxation behavior, and depicts the correlation of the relaxation processes with the cover factor and the stitch density.

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