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Importance of solving the environmental pollution has attracted lots of designers and engineers’ attentions towards finding different available solutions such as substituting polymer-based raw materials with the natural ones. Thus, significant efforts applied by the researchers are generally involved to find new recourses of natural fibers instead of using the petroleum-based synthetic fibers. Among the variety of newly known natural resources, Milkweed is categorized as a versatile substitutive fiber with numerous unique properties which are mainly attributed to their hollowness structures. The presence of hollow channel along the fiber length is responsible for their lightweight and good insulation properties. Because of the fibers’ ecological and chemical benefits, numerous technical application fields could be considered for the eco-friendly and non-allergenic textiles made of Milkweed fibers especially in production of medical goods. Since morphological aspects as well as physical and mechanical properties of the Milkweed fibers significantly affect their functional behavior during their end uses, here in this review paper it is aimed to summarize all the available information regarding the fibers’ characteristics and properties. Having fundamental knowledge about the spin-ability of Milkweed fibers as well as finding the optimized process condition for their carding operation is considered to be the important points for obtaining such applicable textile products with desired properties.

Textile products are considered as an acceptable alternative for commonly used composite reinforcement due to their lightweight as well as relatively high specific strength and stiffness. Among the variety of textile structures which could be employed in composite manufacturing, the role of weft-knitted fabrics is almost very limited. This is because employing the weft-knitting technology would provide such structures with inferior mechanical properties due to their highly looped construction as well as low fiber volume fraction. But on other hand, it is important to be noted that some advantages such as high energy absorption, good impact resistance, and formability of knitted structures made the researchers to focus on investigating different methods by which the inferior mechanical properties of ordinary weft-knitted fabrics could be improved. Inserting the reinforcing yarns through the warp and weft direction of the knitted fabrics is considered as one of the effective solution for improving their mechanical behavior which eventually leads to a high potential product called as biaxial weft-knitted fabrics. In this literature, it is aimed to review different aspects of novel designed biaxial weft-knitted fabrics which could be suitable for a broad area of technical application such as composite reinforcements.

Recent developments in composite manufacturing have been resulted in formation of newly-known 3D integrated weft-knitted fabrics which can be used as the composites’ reinforcing materials. In this paper, the compression-resistivity of 3D composite panels reinforced with these newly designed 3D textile-preforms from E-glass fibers has been studied. Following this research, the composites mechanical functionality under flatwise and edgewise compression loadings was evaluated. Using VIP method, three groups of glass/epoxy composite with different core thicknesses and structural geometries were prepared. It was concluded that the compressive strength of the flat-wisely loaded samples would significantly decrease by increasing the thickness. Moreover, changing the composites’ geometrical shape leads to some changes in failure mode; in this regard, the produced single-decker U-shaped panels only suffer from the pure buckling failure, while the double-decker U-shaped panel failed due to a combination of facing bending stress, core shear stress, and buckling failure. Thickness changes are not as effective as structural geometry changes on the panels’ compress-resistivity under edgewise compression. As compared with the conventional 3D woven sandwich composites, it was approved that mechanical functionality of the produced 3D integrated weft-knitted spacer panels is completely improved so that they can be considered as good alternatives especially in building constructions.

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