Development and validation of a digital application for predicting air permeability of weft knitted fabrics

Abstract

Air permeability is a fundamental property of textile materials that influences their comfort, functional performance, and suitability for specific applications. It refers to the ability of air to pass through a textile structure under a defined pressure differential. In technical textile applications, including filtration media, sails, and parachutes, air permeability is a critical performance parameter because it affects airflow, ventilation, aerodynamic behavior, and the overall functional efficiency of the material. Therefore, accurate characterization of air permeability is essential for evaluating and optimizing textile structures according to their intended end use. In this work, an application is developed using COMSOL Multiphysics® software using application builder feature incorporating C-Sharp scripting language for the prediction of air permeability of plain weft knitted fabrics by employing computational fluid dynamics. This application will automatically generate 3D weft knitted fabric model and effectively calculate the air permeability. The purpose of this application is to allow users to easily input few structural parameters of fabric, simulate airflow through the plain weft knitted structure and visualize all the results without interacting directly with the underlying physics model. The predicted air permeability results obtained from application have been compared with those from published experimental research on air permeability, and it was found that the results were highly correlated.