The differentiated selection of needles provides greater possibilities to create patterns with different levels of complexity to meet the needs of a fashion market which requires increasingly sophisticated and innovative garments.
Needle selection can be carried out on circular knitting machines with different degrees of complexity: from the differentiated control of cams acting on high and low butt needles, to needles with multilevel butts (where each butt level matches a cam track), to the selection techniques based on Jacquard motions.
The most common selection system for the creation of plain (or simple operated) patterns on single and double bed machines, are the needles provided with multilevel butts matching the corresponding cam tracks to carry out the knitting cycle.
The operating principle is quite simple: when the needle reaches a specific knitting level, it generates a knit stitch, a tuck stitch or a miss stitch according to the type of cam sliding in the track corresponding to the specific needle butt level.
Jacquard selection systems allow the knitting of elaborated patterns. On Jacquard selection systems, large clusters of needles can work independently and each single needle in a cluster can work independently from the others (needle-by-needle selection).