6th International Conference - TEXSCI 2007

June 5-7, Liberec, Czech Republic

A NEW APPROACH TO MEASURE FABRIC SURFACE PROPERTIES FOR HANDLE PREDICTION

Vildan Slar, Aye Okur Dokuz Eyll University Textile Engineering Department, Izmir Turkey Recently there are various types of fabrics owing to various synthetic fibers and technological developments in the production processes. These efforts are all for increasing consumer needs of a specific quality. This wide product variation makes the production and marketing processes more complex as consumers make a decision in a few minutes by touching and feeling the fabric. Touching and feeling a fabric is the first behaviour of a consumer when evaluating fabric quality and is traditionally called as fabric handle. Although this is a fast and convenient sort of quality control, subjectivity of fabric handle leads to serious quality variations. Objective measurement of fabric handle is desirable to allow more accurate comparisons between different types of fabrics. Fabric mechanical and surface properties affect fabric handle. Although many researches emphasize that surface properties are one of the most important properties affecting fabric handle, there is not an agreement on a common standard method. Today, everybody knows the attempts of Kawabata and KESF (Kawabata Evaluation System for Fabrics) which is a very famous system to measure surface properties of fabrics [1]. In addition to the studies of Kawabata, many researchers such as Hearle and Amirbayat [2], Matsudaira et al. [3,4], Ajayi[5], Rangulam et al. [6], Matsuo et al. [7], Okur [8], Ramkumar et al. [9, 10] also made studies on this subject. Some of these studies focused on the measurement of surface properties while some of them were on the factors which affect these properties. This study makes a new approach to measure fabric surface properties by using a surface roughness tester which has not been used for textiles before (Figure 1). Roughness measurements were performed on fabrics and also it was found that these roughness results may be useful for fabric handle prediction.

Figure 1. Measuring unit on a piece of fabric [11] To carry out this evaluation, some parameters of 100% wool worsted mens suitings were measured objectively and subjective tests were performed by using the same fabrics. Besides roughness measurements, tensile and shearing properties were measured by using Instron Tensile Tester. Extracting from a nozzle tests were also performed by Instron. Fabric bending properties, fabric thickness and also fabric unit weight were also measured. An

6th International Conference - TEXSCI 2007

June 5-7, Liberec, Czech Republic

expert panel assessed stiffness, thickness, roughness and total handle of fabrics for the subjective part and a total handle value was calculated by using these data. Spearman correlation analyses were carried out to examine the relations between subjective and objective roughness test results, and to select the most associated roughness parameters with subjective tests. Among other objective parameters, these selected roughness characteristics were used to predict fabric handle. Consequently, some regression equations were obtained that may be a practical solution for fabric handle predictions. Keywords: fabric handle, fabric roughness, suitings. References [1] Kawabata, S. (1980). The standardization and analysis of hand evaluation (2nd Ed.) The Textile Machinery of Japan:Osaka [2] Hearle, J.W.S., ve Amirbayat, J. (1988). The multipurpose fabric tester. Textile Research Journal, 4, 588- 597 [3] Matsudaira, M., Watt, J.D., ve Carnaby, G.A. (1990). Measurement of the surface prickle of fabrics part I: The evaluation of potential objective methods. Journal of The Textile Institute, 81(3), 288- 299 [4] Matsudaira, M., Watt, J.D., ve Carnaby, G.A. (1990). Measurement of the surface prickle of fabrics part II: Some effect of finishing on fabric prickle. Journal of The Textile Institute, 81(3), 300- 309 [5] Ajayi, J., (1992). Fabric smoothness, friction, and handle. Textile Research Journal, 62 (1), 52-59 [6] Rangulam, R.B., Amirbayat, J., ve Porat, I. (1993). Measurement of fabric roughness by a non-contact method. Journal of The Textile Institute, 84 (1), 99-106 [7] Matsuo, T., Okamoto, F., Akiyama, R., and Mukhopadhyay, S.K. (2000). A study of the relationships between the surface properties, hand and structure of shingosen fabrics. Journal of Textile Institute, 91, 78- 91 [8] Okur, A., (2002), A Study on The Frctional Properties of Plain-Knitted Cotton Fabrics, Textile Asia, August, 32-34 [9] Ramkumar, S. S., Wood D. J., Fox, K., and Harlock, C., (2003). Developing a polymeric human finger sensor to study the frictional properties of textiles, Part I: Artificial finger development, Textile Research Journal, Vol:73 (6), 469-473 [10] Ramkumar, S. S., Wood D. J., Fox, K., and Harlock, C., (2003). Developing a polymeric human finger sensor to study the frictional properties of textiles, Part II: Experimental results, Textile Research Journal, 73 (7), 606-610 [11] Slar, V. (2005), A Study to Estimate Fabric Handle Based on Measurable Fabric Properties, Ph.D.Thesis, Dokuz Eylul University The Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Turkey