Impact of recent developments in fabrication of auxetic materials on safety and protection in sport

Abstract

Avoiding injury and increasing the safety and protection of the athletes and sports enthusiasts is the driving force for the development of protective equipment (PE) and personal protective equipment (PPE). In addition, as opposed to medical intervention, employing sports safety equipment is the cost effective solution. However, the implementation of sports safety equipment involves several challenges with lack of standard for the protective gear being the principal challenge. In order to overcome the competition in the market for sports safety equipment, manufacturers try to achieve higher standards (or overdesign). In the domain of materials development for sports safety equipment, one important candidate that cannot be overlooked is auxetic materials. Auxetic materials have a negative Poisson ratio (NPR) that gives them high tolerance to indentation and resilience to fractures. Recent advances in the manufacturing of auxetic materials give more influence over the cell framework created by the producers, thereby enabling the production of auxetic materials with outstanding characteristics and improved safety standards. Specific manufacturing techniques used to generate auxetic foams and textiles have been studied, while also discussing the effect of combining finite element analysis (FEA) and additive manufacturing (AM) on auxetic materials manufacturing