Revealing Rheological Parameters of Cotton-stitch-modified Cotton Fabrics by Three-Network Modeling (TNM) of Materials

Cotton threads and fabrics are the most used textile materials and have garnered widespread interest for smart textiles to capture human-centered cyber-physical and human-health-related bioanalytical data. Cotton threads are sewn (manually or digitally) into fabrics to achieve functional and fashion stitches that soften or stiffen the base fabric. There has been limited investigation into the influence of a single stitch on the mechanical properties of knitted cotton fabric. Such understanding may become critical to producing optimized textile-based composites/smart materials involving sewing operations. While stitching operations are investigated in numerous ways to produce a range of smart wearables, herein, we demonstrate the rheological modification of base cotton fabric induced by two types of singular stitches (straight and zigzag). We have sewn simple straight and zigzag cotton stitches to investigate the rheological modification of the base cotton fabrics. Uniaxial stress-strain experimental data, combined with constitutive modeling (i.e., three-network model, TNM) obtained from the calibration software (MCalibration), revealed the feasibility of a data-driven approach to investigate the rheological parameters. Our experimental analyses, combined with the calibrated data, suggest a 99.99% confidence in assessing the influence of a single stitch on knitted cotton fabrics. We have also used distributed strain energy to analyze the mechanics and failure of the base and stitched fabrics. Our study may enable the design and study of integrating smart threads in cotton fabrics to produce smart wearables, e-textile, biomedical and e-fashion textiles.