Research And Development Of The CAD System For Flat-knitted Woolen Sweater Technology

Flat-knitted sweater, one kind of garments with compelling wearing properties andfashionable styles, has been attached with increasing popularity among the customers.Focusing on making specification sheet, the existing CAD software for flat-knitted sweaterdesign has a limited coverage in knitting industry due to numbers of shortcomings, such aslack of function of cost accounting and pattern grading. Therefore, this paper shows animproved software for flat-knitted sweater design with high efficiency, less time and betterquality on the basis of further study on pattern grading, gram weight estimating and costpredicting after comparing presented software programs.To develop this software program, the paper firstly presents how to build a database ofboth sweater styles and knitting templates based on classification of sweater patterns todifferent types. This database makes it possible for designers to immediately choose whatkind of patterns they need instead of designing all parts of the whole garment, substantiallydecreasing the design time. Afterwards, this paper presents a mathematic model forflat-knitted sweater design, consisting of newly separated calculation algorithm for narrowing,widening, gram weight estimating as well as pattern grading. Then the paper states how todesign the whole system for this smart software with VC++as system language and Access2003as platform for database in VC6.0programming. Finally, taking a whole design processof one sweater as example, the paper proves the practicability and accuracy of the designsoftware for flat-knitted sweater in making technical sheets, estimating cost and auto-grading.