Woven cloth is the oldest fibre-reinforced material. It is merely held together by the friction of the fibres threaded past each other, yet is amazingly durable. Furthermore, it has the useful property of being extremely weak in shear. A square of cloth can easily be pulled sideways into a parallelogram; instead of crossing each other at right angles, the warp and weft fibres merely do so at a slightly different angle. In couture, this property is neatly exploited in the ‘bias cut’, invented by Mme Vionnet in 1922. In a bias-cut garment the fibres run, not vertically and horizontally, but at 45o. It can stretch vertically, while shrinking horizontally to emphasize the wearer's figure.
Daedalus is now extending this idea to three dimensions. Just as two sets of fibres can be i nterwoven at right angles to make a flat cloth, so three sets at right angles could create a fibrous solid. A three-dimensional loom is as simple in principle, though more complicated in practice, than the normal planar variety. Daedalus's design has a square array of parallel threads running vertically, and two sets of shuttles at right angles running horizontally through the array. As each layer of interwoven horizontal threads is complete, beaters pack it down on the previous layers. The result is a solid block of three interwoven orthogonal sets of fibres.
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