Fast Fashion: High Throughput Fabric & Textile Testing Prototype

Based in Spain, SEDDI is a digital fashion-design software company committed to delivering better textiles to the garment industry. They aim to have a comprehensive textiles materials library, so designers and producers may know all the behavioural properties before production.

Their product is essentially Computer-Aided Design (CAD) for fashion. Much like mechanical CAD libraries describe plastics and steels, SEDDI offers a data bank to customers looking to understand the physical properties of textiles and fabrics.

In order to build a comprehensive library, SEDDI would have to measure the mechanical properties of thousands of fabrics from suppliers from around the globe. These characteristics includes stretch along the warp, weft and bias directions, and how the fabric hangs. Measuring and recording such an incredible amount of varied fabrics would pose an insurmountable challenge. The challenge was to considerably expedite the process.

Although effective, the SEDDI proof-of-concept machine was faced a barrier to scale the measurements:

• Slow: characterising even one fabric took about 11 minutes.
• Fragmented: the load system and the camera were separate, so the fabric would have to be mounted repeatedly.
• Manual: samples were fixed with small hex bolts, which was slow and awkward.
• Unreliable on difficult fabrics: very light fabrics gave inconsistent results, and samples could tear or yield at the clamps.

The SEDDI team needed a more integrated, commercial-style machine that would handle roughly 400–500 captures per month and could be operated by a trained user without fuss.

The Enginuity Mechanical Design team took SEDDI’s validated test method and collated the functions into a single, purpose-designed machine. Most of the engineering risk had already been removed, so Enginuity’s focus was on usability and speed.

• One mount, one machine: the fabric is loaded once. The machine runs the no-load “pair loop” test, then pulls the fabric in tension to produce a force-displacement curve.
• Quick, gentle clamping: a cam-over clamp, similar to a bicycle skewer, replaced the hex bolts. A stainless-steel knife edge spreads the load evenly across the sample’s width, so it doesn’t slip, ripple or tear.
• Easy loading: a purpose-built fixture sets the span and lets the operator lay the fabric in and drop it into place.
• Reliable imaging: an enclosed, light-sealed T-slot cabinet with a rear-mounted camera and a diffused LED backlight. The backlight casts a clear edge shadow, and the light colour can be changed for fabrics that blend into the background.
• Practical engineering: The mechanical design used a linear actuator with stepper drive, a load cell zeroed for each sample’s weight, and a pre-configured laptop supplied with the unit. The team 3D-printed prototypes before building the machine.

SEDDI’s partnership with Enginuity turned a slow proof of concept into a machine built for production pace. A single mount, fast cam-over clamping, and an integrated imaging cabinet gave operators consistent results across fabrics from heavy weaves to the lightest textiles.

Characterization time dropped from 11 minutes to 2.5, making 400 to 500 captures per month routine and proving that usability is an engineering lever, not a cosmetic one. Although SEDDI’s direction later shifted, the machine remains a credible stepping stone toward commercial design, and it extends Enginuity’s presence in materials testing alongside the product development work we do across industries.