Sunday, March 10, 2019

Sunday Knitting Blog


Ever wonder about the science of knitting?

Dating back more than 3,000 years, knitting is an ancient form of manufacturing, but Elisabetta Matsumoto of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta believes that understanding how stitch types govern shape and stretchiness will be invaluable for designing new "tunable" materials. For instance, tissuelike flexible material could be manufactured to replace biological tissues, such as torn ligaments, with stretchiness and sizing personalized to fit each individual.

At the American Physical Society March Meeting in Boston this week, Matsumoto will present her work on the mathematical rules that underlie knitting. She will also participate in a press conference describing the work. Information for logging on to watch and ask questions remotely is included at the end of this news release.
"By picking a stitch you are not only choosing the geometry but the elastic properties, and that means you can build in the right mechanical properties for anything from aerospace engineering to tissue scaffolding materials," said Matsumoto.


Matsumoto enjoyed knitting as a child and when she later became interested in mathematics and physics, she developed a new appreciation for her hobby.
"I realized that there is just a huge amount of math and materials science that goes into textiles, but that is taken for granted an awful lot," said Matsumoto.
"Every type of stitch has a different elasticity, and if we figure out everything possible then we could create things that are rigid in a certain place using a certain type of stitch, and use a different type of stitch in another place to get different functionality."



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