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Female seamless soft body armor pattern design system with innovative reverse engineering approaches

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Abstract

Significant efforts have been made so far to improve the overall performance of female soft body armor. However, still designing female soft body armor which accommodates the bust area for different women morphological differences with good comfort, fitness, and better ballistic protection is in its great demand. This research paper presents an efficient reverse engineering approach (2D-3D-2D pattern generation) for developing appropriate 2D patterns from 3D female adaptive virtual mannequin for female soft body armor seamless front panel. The method was mainly used to attain the required bust volume in the pattern by eliminating the involvement of darts and another design element. Before the process, using computer-aided design (CAD), parameterization has been applied to develop a female model with an adaptive bust from a scanned body. The method starts with identifying the different strategic anthropometric points on the front body side contours of adaptive mannequin using specific 90B size bust cup. Based on these points, delimiting of the outer contour of the pattern has been done. Later, horizontal (weft) and vertical (warp) projection grids in front of the virtual mannequin were marked to generate block pattern using curve measurement from the body couture, while during projection, an accurate measurement using precise projection system and bust points has been considered. Finally, the material deformation has been also analyzed using classical 3D-to-2D flattened pattern. The result shows that the new flattened pattern reveals better shape to accommodate the deformation with low distortion throughout the fabric surface while flattening. This will later greatly help to keep similar fabric distribution throughout the panel and give better ballistic protection, fit-ensured, and good comfort for the wearer.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been done as part of Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Programme SMDTex-sustainable Management and Design for Textile project, which is financially supported by the European Erasmus Mundus Program. Special thanks to LECTRA for supporting different software.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lille 1, Cité Scientifique, 59650, Villeneuve-d’Ascq Lille, France

    Mulat Alubel Abtew, Pascal Bruniaux & François Boussu

  2. ENSAIT, GEMTEX, 2 Allée Louise et Victor Champier, 59056, Roubaix Cedex 1, France

    Mulat Alubel Abtew, Pascal Bruniaux & François Boussu

  3. Gheorghe Asachi’ Technical University Iasi, Faculty of Textiles, Leather and Industrial Management, Dimitrie Mangeron Bd., 53, 700050, Iasi, Romania

    Mulat Alubel Abtew, Carmen Loghin & Irina Cristian

  4. Soochow University, College of Textile and Clothing Engineering, Suzhou, 215021, China

    Mulat Alubel Abtew, Yan Chen & Lichuan Wang

Authors
  1. Mulat Alubel Abtew
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  2. Pascal Bruniaux
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  3. François Boussu
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  4. Carmen Loghin
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  5. Irina Cristian
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  6. Yan Chen
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  7. Lichuan Wang
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Correspondence to Mulat Alubel Abtew.

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Abtew, M.A., Bruniaux, P., Boussu, F. et al. Female seamless soft body armor pattern design system with innovative reverse engineering approaches. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 98, 2271–2285 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-018-2386-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-018-2386-y

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