Elsevier

Computer-Aided Design

Volume 43, Issue 12, December 2011, Pages 1854-1869
Computer-Aided Design

A multi-disciplinary strategy for computer-aided clothing thermal engineering design

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cad.2011.06.009Get rights and content

Abstract

The designers and manufactures in apparel industry have urgent needs in designing clothing with superior thermal functions with user-friendly and cost-effective design tools. This paper presents a multi-disciplinary strategy for computer-aided clothing thermal engineering design. It provides a systematical approach to integrate multi-disciplinary knowledge and transfer it into engineering-oriented design tools, thus the designers and manufacturers can easily carry out 1D, 2D and even 3D clothing thermal engineering designs according to the practical design requirements with a short design cycle and low design cost. The research work of this strategy begins from the investigation of the role of the thermal functions of clothing in the thermal comfort of human body. Then the framework is proposed to integrate the multi-disciplinary knowledge and illustrate the process to achieve the thermal engineering design of clothing. The important issues in the realization of computational simulation are addressed, including multi-scale model integration, data availability of characteristic parameters and hierarchical computational scheme. To issue easy-to-use design tools, the thermal functional design of clothing is quantified with important influence parameters, and the user-friendly wizard is designed for the CAD system development. Finally, the design applications of this strategy are discussed in terms of 1D, 2D and 3D thermal engineering designs with versatile CAD systems.

Highlights

► Clothing thermal engineering design involves multi-disciplinary knowledge. ► It has been realized on the basis of simulation capability and computer-aided design system. ► CTE–CAD systems can be developed for different clothing thermal design requirements. ► There has been a great difficulty for the users in understanding complex theoretical knowledge. ► Clothing thermal engineering has been achieved quickly and economically.

Introduction

Clothing plays a very important role in people’s daily life, as it greatly influences the biological health and psychological happiness of human beings. Currently, clothing design not only focuses on the pattern and fashion design. It has many considerations on the functional performance of the clothing, making the clothing more smart and comfort for various environments. As the barrier between the human body and external environment, clothing needs to be sensitive enough to the environment and generates a reasonable thermal microenvironment around the body to help it deal with external weather conditions. Hence, the high quality clothing with good thermal functions in terms of thermal insulation, water vapor permeability, air breathability, waterproof, moisture management, and UV protection, not only is pursued by the professional athletes, but also is desired by the common consumers and becomes an important concern in their buying decision.

Recently, with the successful cross-disciplinary teamwork, many innovative textile materials and technologies have been developed to improve the functional performance of clothing [1]. Heat generating/storing fiber and fabric, nano-composite materials, smart phase change material and intelligent coating/membrane are such examples and have been available for clothing thermal functional design [2]. However, the clothing thermal functional design, if following the traditional design way, needs to begin from the concept design and physical prototype making. Subsequently, a series of experimental testing should be performed on human subjects or thermal manikins and collect thermal data [3]. Based on the data analysis, designers then attempt to compare the measured thermal functions and design concepts to validate and improve their design. Such trial and error procedure will be iterative until the final products are achieved. This traditional design process is expensive, time-consuming and tedious caused by the iterative physical prototype making, experimental testing and burdensome data analysis.

Due to these disadvantages, the designers and manufacturers are difficult to design and produce clothing with good thermal functions fast and cost-effectively. With the advancements of computerization in the clothing industry, people come to resort to the powerful capacity of computer in the clothing design process. Until now, a number of CAD packages have been developed for different purposes including pattern design, fashion style design, fitting simulation and visualization, and scenario animation [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]. However, their functions are the geometrical modeling and mechanical behavior simulation of the clothing. They cannot help the designers and manufacturers to achieve desirable thermal functions of the clothing, which requires the new focus to be placed on the clothing’s thermal behaviors. That requirement also brings new challenges to the designers and manufactures that: (i) it needs to develop knowledge about the physical mechanisms and influence factors of the thermal behaviors involved in the textile material or even in the human body-clothing-environment system during the wearing time, and (ii) how to utilize this knowledge to easily and quickly realize the thermal functional design of clothing with low cost.

On the other hand, it is able to find many literature on the physical mechanisms and theoretical models of the thermal behaviors in the textile material and the human body thermoregulation system, as well as the clothing–human body system [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20]. These researches though laid substantial foundation in simulating and predicting the thermal distributions of textile material and human body, still have a long distance to be directly applied in engineering design due to: (1) most of them just deal with a single physical process or partial interactive phenomena, and need to be systematically integrated according to the interaction relationship and physical features of the involved thermal behaviors; (2) these models may have limitations for engineering purpose, such as the assumption of ideal conditions, the ignorance of important physical phenomenon, and the lack of available data for the parameters in models; (3) the complexity of these models also leads to great difficulty for the designers and manufactures in understanding and applying of these numerical methods.

In order to help the designers and manufacturers to quickly carry out clothing thermal functional design, as exploration work, we have developed two software systems respectively for multi-layer and multi-style thermal functional design of clothing [21], [22]. They adopted different simulation models and respectively allows the one-dimensional and two-dimensional design, which can satisfy an amount of design requirements very well. However, the systematical approach to integrate required knowledge and transfer the knowledge into engineering-oriented design tools for 1D, 2D and even 3D functional design is still not presented. That is very helpful to train the designers and manufacturers as practitioners to quickly carry out clothing thermal functional design according to the practical requirements, and meanwhile it is a necessary for future work extension. Furthermore, for the purpose of easy-to-use, the thermal functional design should be quantified with a series of influence parameters. For different design requirements, the designers and manufacturers should be able to have a fine solution with short design cycle and low design cost according to the practice.

This paper proposes a strategy of computer-aided clothing thermal engineering design, which provides a systematical approach to integrate multi-disciplinary knowledge and develop engineering-oriented design tools for the designers and manufactures to carry out 1D, 2D and 3D thermal engineering design. This strategy will offer the designers and manufacturers cost-effective solutions with versatile user-friendly design tools to achieve desirable thermal functional clothing for various wearing scenarios. The development of this strategy begins from the investigation of the role of clothing in the thermal comfort of human body. Then the multi-disciplinary framework is presented to integrate the knowledge from the diverse fields of physical, physiological, mathematical, computational and software sciences. The computational simulation capacity is realized to convert the knowledge into computing power by addressing the important issues of multi-scale model integration, data availability of characteristic parameters and hierarchical computational scheme. In order to issue friendly design tools, the thermal functional design of clothing is quantified with important influence parameters. The 3D simulation capability of clothing wearing system and the user-friendly wizard are discussed for the CAD system development. As design applications of this strategy, 1D, 2D and 3D clothing thermal engineering design can be carried out for the different design requirements in practice.

Section snippets

Role of the thermal functions of clothing in the thermal comfort of human body

Clothing can reduce or control energy loss from the body to ensure its comfort, hence is usually regarded as an extension of the body itself or called “the second skin”. Clothing with poor thermal functions may result in discomfort feeling, physical strain, and even heat or cold injury in some extreme cases. In order to achieve clothing with desirable thermal functions, firstly, it needs to analyze the contributors of thermal comfort of the body, which have been classified as climatic

Multi-disciplinary framework

From the discussion above, we can find that the theoretical researches of physics related to the textiles/clothing and the biological thermoregulations of human body are the foundation to achieve desirable thermal functions of clothing with engineering design method. Based on such theoretical foundation, the mathematical models which numerically describe the involved physic mechanisms are required, and the computational simulation capability is essential to transfer the theoretical models into

Capability of computational simulation

Computational simulation is the necessary capability to transfer the complex knowledge and models into computing power. It can be achieved by the development of simulation models, characteristic parameters and computational scheme. In order to make it engineering-oriented, the criteria for multi-scale models integration is described, the data availability of characteristic parameters is figured out, and the hierarchical structure of the computational scheme is build up considering the design

Functional design parameters

During the iterative computation, the simulation results are mainly influenced by the key physical properties of textile materials and the style of clothing. In order to help the designers and manufacturers to easily and quickly carry out functional design, it is significant to have a quantitative analysis of the influence of these key properties on the thermal performance of clothing. Thus the thermal functional design can be quantified with a series of influence parameters to achieve

Design applications

In the practical design cases, the designers and manufacturers may have different requirements on the design. For instance, they just need a quick preview of the different thermal performance when using different textile materials to have a comparison and make decision; or they need consider the different style (long, media or short) of the clothing and its thermal performance on the different body parts while do not expect long simulation time; or they intend to design the clothing in 3D view

Discussions

This computer-aided engineering design strategy can benefit the design of thermal quality clothing with many advantages, which cannot be obtained from the conventional design approach. Fig. 16 illustrates the design cycles of thermal functional clothing from concepts to final products respectively in the conventional design approach and thermal engineering design strategy. From the comparison between the steps throughout the design cycle, the computer-aided thermal engineering design strategy

Conclusion

In this paper, we presented a multi-disciplinary strategy to systematically integrate involved knowledge and offer engineering-oriented design tools for 1D, 2D and 3D computer-aided clothing thermal engineering design. The involved multi-disciplinary knowledge comes from the diverse fields of physical, physiological, mathematical, computational and software sciences. The role of the thermal functions of clothing in the thermal comfort of human body has been investigated. Based on the proposed

Acknowledgments

The work of this paper is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundations of China (Grant Nos 61003173 and 60973084) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2009ZM0128) and the Foundation for Distinguished Young Talents in Higher Education of Guangdong, China (Grant No. LYM10018).

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