织物声子晶体：把「隔振能力」直接织进布料

Weaving patterns in fabrics, traditionally used for aesthetic purposes, present a largely untapped opportunity to create metamaterials that serve as passive layers for sensing, filtering, and signal processing.

However, the hierarchical architecture of fabrics makes structural design and wave prediction challenging.

Here, we establish fully woven fabrics as phononic crystals that passively filter and route elastic vibrations.

Using double weaving, we integrate a soft cotton weave with stiff woven copper inclusions to form periodic fabric lattices with engineered dispersion.

A multiscale modeling framework that combines homogenization of weave blocks with an effective-property macroscale model enables computationally efficient design of phononic crystals.

Simulations and experiments confirm a pronounced phononic bandgap for out-of-plane vibrations in a finite fabric crystal, while an equivalent pure cotton weave shows no band suppression in the corresponding frequency range.

Building on the same platform, we realize a fully woven higher-order topological insulator.

Modal analysis and transmission measurements reveal in-gap edge states and localized corner states.

These results show that phononic bandgaps and topological states can be directly encoded through weaving patterns and material contrast, enabling passive vibration management layers and multifunctional waveguiding fabrics for sensing, haptic interfaces, robotics, and noise mitigation.

Fabrics have long been used as protective layers against wind, heat, cold, and injury, as well as for decorative purposes [18, 7]. High‑performance textiles further extend these roles to applications such as soft ballistic‑impact protection in bulletproof vests and turbine‑engine fragment barriers [30]. Recently, fabrics have evolved into “smart” materials that integrate mechanical, acoustic, electrical, thermal, optical, and other advanced functions [3, 21, 20]. These capabilities are typically achieved by embedding sensors, actuators, and circuits directly into the textile structure. However, implementing complex sensing functions often requires large numbers of active components, which increases fabrication complexity, maintenance challenges, and power consumption [34, 29, 19, 16, 4, 1, 22, 31, 13, 25, 33, 12]. For example, an 8×8 pressure-sensor array was embedded into a 16 cm×16 cm fabric to sense the touch input for human-machine interface [34]. Similarly, a 4×5 acoustic-microphone array was produced on a large-area conformal textile substrate for directional sound detection [12, 27].

Phononic crystals are periodically arranged wave scatterers that interact with acoustic/mechanical waves in a similar way to how atomic lattices interact with electronic waves. Waves of specific frequencies and momenta are allowed to propagate in the periodic system, leading to pass bands and bandgaps in the dispersion relations. In the bandgaps, wave propagation is prohibited along certain, or all, directions [23, 10, 24, 28]. Within the band gap, waves can be trapped at a point defect, or propagate along a line or surface that can serve as a waveguide. Phononic crystals have been widely explored by researchers for their exotic properties when interacting with acoustic/elastic waves, such as negative refraction [24, 28, 41, 8, 9], acoustic collimation [40, 15, 26, 32], directional acoustic signal transmittance and reception [23, 14, 43, 42], and topologically robust and defect-insensitive wave guiding and splitting [14, 44, 6, 43, 39, 45, 42], all of which provides new opportunities for acoustic/mechanical wave transport and manipulation, information science, and sensing. Because fabrics are intrinsically hierarchical structures composed of yarns, their weaving patterns, traditionally used primarily for aesthetic purposes, present a largely untapped opportunity to create phononic crystals that can serve as passive layers for sensing, filtering, and signal processing.

In this work, we introduce and experimentally validate a new class of fabric‑based phononic crystals, engineered by creating periodic patterns of fabric patches with different mechanical properties in woven fabrics. Our approach leverages the intrinsic geometric and material versatility of weaving to combine soft and light-weight cotton yarns with stiff and heavy metallic fibers, creating a large mechanical contrast that enables precise control over elastic wave propagation. By systematically tailoring this contrast and the periodic architecture, we designed fully woven fabric sheets that exhibit targeted phononic band structures capable of manipulating vibrations.

In this work, we introduce and experimentally validate a new class of fabric‑based phononic crystals, engineered by creating periodic patterns of fabric patches with different mechanical properties in woven fabrics.

To accurately predict and optimize the dynamic behavior of the fabrics, we developed a multiscale modeling framework that integrates detailed mesoscale simulations at the yarn level with homogenized macroscale models for full fabric analysis.

Leveraging this design platform, we demonstrate two representative phononic fabric architectures for controlling elastic vibrations: (i) a bandstop filter exhibiting a bandgap that prohibits wave propagation, and (ii) a topological insulator that confines vibrations to selected edges and corners.

In this work, we established fully woven fabrics as a practical and scalable platform for phononic crystals that can passively filter and control elastic vibrations. By integrating a soft cotton weave with stiff woven copper inclusions, we created hierarchical fabric architectures whose periodicity and material contrast produce nontrivial dispersion behavior. An important enabler is a multiscale computational framework for the predictive design of woven systems. It combines homogenized mechanical properties computed at the weave scale with a macroscale model that applies these properties to simulate large fabric architectures without explicitly resolving yarn‑level details. This approach reduces the computational cost of full-resolution modeling and enables efficient analysis of periodic fabric lattices. The current framework also has limitations. It does not fully capture yarn contacts, friction, and sliding, and simplifies local yarn deformation and rearrangement under loading. These effects may contribute to differences between simulations and experiments, including amplitude mismatch and frequency shifts.

Building on this platform, we demonstrate two types of phononic functionality. First, we realize and validate phononic bandgaps in fully woven fabric phononic crystals, confirmed through both multiscale simulations and vibration-transmission experiments. Second, we extend this concept to topological wave control by designing a woven architecture that supports higher-order topological states, including in-gap edge modes and localized corner modes. The agreement between modal predictions, transmission spectra, and measured vibration fields verifies that phononic functionalities can be encoded directly into the fabric geometry and material layout.

More broadly, this work expands the scope of phononic-crystal-based wave manipulation into fully woven textile materials. It identifies fabrics as an emerging class of metamaterial systems in which wave control and vibration signal processing arise from material architecture rather than dense arrays of active components. The demonstrated concepts open opportunities for passive and conformable vibration-management layers, acoustic and vibration sensing elements, wearable sensing and haptic interfaces, noise‑mitigation textiles, and other engineered fabric systems that integrate wave control functionalities within a single woven form factor.