4D Textiles Made by Additive Manufacturing on Pre-Stressed Textiles—An Overview

Abstract

Four-dimensional textiles are textiles that can change shape or function over time by the influence of a stimulus, mainly force and heat. In this review, the focus is on 4D textiles made by additive manufacturing which is built on the concept of 4D printing. A literature survey in Web of Science and Scopus was carried out, which resulted in 29 contributions on additive manufacturing on pre-stressed textiles. In this paper, an overview of materials, production technologies and testing methods is given. The concepts of form giving and shape change transferred to 4D textiles are classified. The influencing factors on the properties of the material structure are presented. The main focus of the literature lies in defining process and material properties for improving the adhesion. Only limited research has been conducted on simulating the material behavior. Ideas for applications exist but no research has been conducted on real applications. Therefore, the challenges are identified, and future research directions are derived.

Infill Designs for 3D-Printed Shape-Memory Objects

“…Comparing these results with literature values is not easy since the test setups vary broadly. In many cases, researchers aim at the so-called 4D printing, meaning that deformation occurs above the glass transition temperature so that breaking of the samples is not to be expected [13,[24][25][26][27]. Here, typically, recovery ratios near 100% are reached, if they are investigated at all; in many cases, one deformation is used to reach the desired final state.…”

Aachen Technology Overview of 3D Textile Materials and Recent Innovation and Applications

“…3.12 3D Printing On Pre-stressed Textiles 4D textiles are textiles and textile products that can change their shape or function over time due to the influence of an external stimulus. External stimuli are mainly force or heat [25]. 4D textiles can appear along the whole textile chain, from shape memory fibers, to self-wrinkling weaves and self-folding hybrid materials [26].…”

“…The most common filament materials are thermoplastic elastomers such as TPU 95 and thermoplastic PLA. The textile serves as an energy storage medium either through structural elastic properties that can be found in warp and weft knitted fabrics or through material elastic properties to be found in elastane [25].…”

Shape memory textiles – technological background and possible applications

“…A broad overview of the concepts of 4D textiles, often working with these multi-layer structures, was given by Schmelzeisen et al [71] as well as Koch et al [72], while Stapleton et al concentrated on finiteelement modeling textiles with a printed polymeric grid on top, in which the textile fabrics were stretched during printing and which thus deformed after taking them off the printing bed into the final state [73].…”