The Effect of Miss and Tuck Stitches on a Weft Knit Strain Sensor

Abstract

Weft knitted conductive fabrics can act as excellent textile strain sensors for human motion capture. The loop architecture dictates the overall electrical properties of weft knit strain sensors. Therefore, research into loop architecture is relevant for comprehensively investigating the design space of e-textile sensors. There are three main types of knit stitches, Knitted loop stitch, Miss stitch, and Tuck stitch. Nevertheless, most of the research into weft knit strain sensors has largely focused on fabrics with only knitted loop stitches. Miss and tuck stitches will affect the contact points in the sensor and, consequently, its piezoresistivity. Therefore, this paper investigates the impact of incorporating miss and tuck stitches on the piezoresistivity of a weft knit sensor. Particularly, the electromechanical models of a miss stitch and a tuck stitch in a weft knit sensor are proposed. These models were used in order to develop loop configurations of sensors that consist of various percentages of miss or tuck stitches. Subsequently, the developed loop configurations were simulated while using LTspice and MATLAB software; and, verified experimentally through a tensile test. The experimental results closely agree with the simulated results. Furthermore, the results reveal that increases in the percentage of tuck or miss stitches in weft knit sensor decrease the initial and average resistance of the sensor. In addition, it was observed that, although the piezoresistivity of a sensor with tuck or miss stitches is best characterised as a quadratic polynomial, increases in the percentage of tuck stitches in the sensor increase the linearity of the sensor’s piezoresistivity.