Team 10 - Simulating Garments to Streamline Garment Prototyping (Under Armour)

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) is the automation of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices that focuses on interconnectivity, machine learning, and real-time data updating. As part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it is expected automation and simulation programs will increasingly come to meet the process improvement demands of both manufacturers and product designers. As originally proposed by Under Armour, our project focused on trying to improve the production process of Under Armour using simulation software to simulate the properties of textile garments. At the beginning of the project planning and research were focused on identifying various programs and systems which could potentially meet Under Armour’s needs and offer the most additional value to its designers. The first program that received our full attention and evaluation was WiseTex, a composite yarn physical property simulation program. Most promising about this program was its capability to account for changes in the fiber composition of unique yarns. However because this program was more focused on composites and numerical outputs, it could not meet the needs of Under Armour’s designers. It was concluded that current on market programs were not able to surpass the programs Under Armour was currently using for soft textiles. After this, our attention was focused on finding ways to improve on one of Under Armour’s current used programs: CLO3D, a unique garment simulation program that focused on modeling the way a fabric conforms to body structures. We decided to focus on data collection as the area for most improvement in the program with the assumption that better data outputs more realistic simulations. By comparing test apparatuses widely accepted to our improvements with 3D technology, we hope to provide more detailed and accurate readings of a qualitative property. As this project moves towards its conclusion, we expect to deliver to Under Armour a unique model which could more accurately predict the physical properties of fabrics simulated in CLO, thereby improving the utility of the product as a whole, greater insight into how individuals understand and perceive the drape of a product, and a unique method for measuring the drape of fabric using 3D scanning technology.

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