CAD of woven textile structures has received much attention in the technical textiles community.
Research and development has concentrated on the simple 2D weaves and some of the 3D weaves such as
angle-interlock, orthogonal, multi-layer and hollow woven structures. This paper addresses the void in the
literature with respect to the more advanced and complex nodal structure and the CAD of 3D woven nodal
textile structures. Innovative use of a k-ary tree data structure is used to keep track of nodal connectivity and
parent-child hierarchical transformation relationships. In addition, the k-ary tree allows the design of more
complex nodal configurations beyond simple \u2018T\u2019 and \u2018K\u2019 shapes due to the inherent hierarchical nature of the
tree data structure. The described nodal CAD software progresses beyond the frequently encountered simple
2D interfaces of many existing textile CAD systems. 3D interfaces are used to allow the user to interactively
create and edit almost any nodal configuration limited only by the weaving width of the employed loom.
Novel and robust algorithms and modelling techniques are described to automate the nodal CAD process: 3D
geometry specification, flattening and segmentation of nodal geometry, design paper mapping and weave
architecture allocation to include: automatic computation of strut weaves, strut composite weaves and semi-
automatic computation of stitching points. 3D nodal CAD has been implemented in C++ as part of the
ongoing WeaveStudio CAD/CAM software system.
