Design Method of Circular Weft-Knitted Jacquard Fabric Based on Jacquard Module

Abstract Recently, there is an increasing interest in design of circular weft jacquard because of the pursuit of fashion and comfort. Aiming at the complexity of the computer-aided design method of the existing circular weft-knitted jacquard fabrics, which is not conducive to the rapid design and intelligible for designers, a design method was proposed to transform pattern notation into knitting diagram efficiently, which was based on knitting rules and its creation as a set of jacquard modules. Knitting characteristics of jacquard fabrics were studied as a precondition. On this basis, the design procedures of jacquard modules were analyzed and illustrated by taking tricolor bird's eye backing jacquard as an example. Jacquard modules with various jacquard effects were designed and stored in a jacquard module database. To mathematically describe pattern notation, knitting diagram, and jacquard module, two-dimensional matrixes were established by the method of mathematical modeling, and a corresponding algorithm for the transformation of the pattern to knitting information according to the knitting rules of jacquard modules, which can be applied to ordinary jacquard fabrics was summarized. The project of tricolor circular weft-knitted jacquard with bird's eye in the reverse and four-color air-layer jacquard were taken for instance to verify the models and algorithm. The results obtained show that the approach can efficiently and conveniently realize the designation and machine-knitting of weft-knitted jacquard fabric, which provide a theoretical basis and notation of modeling for the computer-aided design of circular weft-knitted jacquard fabrics.