The application of additive manufacturing, well known as 3D printing, in textile industry is not more totally new. It allows is giving significant increase of the product variety, production stages reduction, widens the application areas of textiles, customization of design and properties of products according to the type of applications requirement. This paper presents a review of the current state-of-the-art, related to complete process of additive manufacturing. Beginning with the design tools, the classical machinery building computer-aided design (CAD) software, the novel non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) based software and parametric created models are reported. Short overview of the materials demonstrates that in this area few thermoplastic materials become standards and currently a lot of research for the application of new materials is going. Three types of 3D printing, depending on the relation to textiles, are identified and reported from the literature—3D printing on textiles, 3D printing of flexible structures and 3D printing with flexible materials. Several applications with all these methods are reported and finally the main advantages and disadvantages of the 3D printing in relation to textile industry are given.

Warp knitted fabrics are widely used in medical and technical applications, as well as for clothing textiles. To predict their properties, it is useful to have knowledge about the yarn geometry and the yarn interactions within these fabrics. The geometrical modelling of warp knitted structures from single bed knitting machines is documented in the literature. This text concentrates on a computation of the geometry of warp knitted structures, which have complex 3D forms or which are draped over similar ones. The topological information about the structure produced on the machine, is used to create the basic geometry of this structure. After creating the basic geometry, it is transferred to a 3D deformed state of the relaxed fabric. The paper starts with a short overview of the research papers about simulation of warp knitted structures. General theoretical remarks about the transformation from basic structure to 3D structure are given. Examples of spacer fabric with constant or non-constant thickness and tubular fabrics are included. All the results concentrate on the topological representation of the geometry and at this stage do not take into account the influence of internal and external forces exerted on the fabric.

In this paper two methods for 3Dimensional modeling of the plain weft knitted structures are presented. The aim is models to be more realistic concerning yarn cross section properties. The first model is based on the assumption that yarn cross section changes to ellipse-like form in the areas with high curvature. The second one is a discrete particle model of the loops, which takes into account the local changes of the yarn following from the contact forces. It calculates actual yarn geometry on the contact places iteratively, as general nonlinear compression behavior of the yarn is assumed.

This paper provides a critical overview about the state of the art in the area of three-dimensional modeling of braided structures. It gives a generalized geometrical approach for modeling braided structures with arbitrary floating length and filaments in the yarn. The approach is tested with large set of structures of different types. Subsequently, one of the simulated geometries is compared with the real geometry of braided tube.