Presented experimental work analyzes the effect of hysteretic superelastic material behaviour on the vibration damping capacity of plain weft knitted fabrics made of superelastic Nickel-Titanium wires. The damping is evaluated while the fabric is clamped at a circular boundary and subjected to out-of-plane mechanical loadings. Through this experiment, we mainly analyze whether the hysteretic superelastic behavior of Nickel-Titanium wires can effectively increase the damping capacity of weft knitted fabrics. For this purpose, we present and discuss comparison of experimentally identified damping capacity of samples containing, on one hand, wires exhibiting superelasticity and, on the other hand, common elastic stainless steel wires. Moreover, effects of knit size and loading parameters such as vibration amplitude, frequency and mean force are analyzed. The presented study shows clearly that the superelasticity contribute to the overall damping capacity of knitted fabrics. However, this contribution is unexpectedly low as it doesn't exceed 25% of the overall damping capacity. Therefore, it is believed that, within the range of applied loadings and for given structural parameters, elasticity is a dominant deformation mechanism in the Nickel-Titanium wires; whereas, superelastic deformation takes place in a minor volume fraction of wires.
