B. Cline; C. Bai; S. Jeong; L. Xu; Y. Wang; J.U. Surjadi; C.M. Portela; T. Chen
arXiv preprint arXiv: 2511.07404.
For their resilience and toughness, filamentous entanglements are ubiquitous in
both natural and engineered systems across length scales, from polymer-chain-
to collagen-networks and from cable-net structures to forest canopies [1–5]. Tex-
tiles are an everyday manifestation of filamentous entanglement: the remarkable
resilience and toughness in knitted fabrics arise predominately from the topol-
ogy of interlooped yarns [6, 7]. Yet most architected materials do not exploit
entanglement as a design primitive, and industrial knitting fixes a narrow set of
patterns for manufacturability [8]. Additive manufacturing has recently enabled
interlocking structures such as chainmail, knot and woven assemblies, hinting at
broader possibilities for entangled architectures [9–11]. The general challenge is to
treat knitting itself as a three-dimensional architected material with predictable
and tunable mechanics across scales. Here, we show that knitted architectures
fabricated additively can be recast as periodic entangled solids whose responses
are both fabric-like and programmable. We reproduce the characteristic behav-
ior of conventional planar knits and extend knitting into the third dimension by
interlooping along three orthogonal directions, yielding volumetric knits whose
stiffness and dissipation are tuned by prescribed pre-strain. We propose a simple.