INSTRUMENTAL MEASUREMENT AND MACROSCOPIC STUDY OF SANDING AND RAISING

Comfort is a major selling point for clothes, and tactile comfort is e ssential: a fabric must be pleasant to the touch. Several textile fini shing processes-improve fabric touch: sanding (or emerizing) (for 30% of clothes) and raising (for polar fleece, a current popular product), for example. There is no current control system for these processes, which are very often used but not well understood. This study describe s a tribological method for investigating sanding and raising, and bri ngs to light the effects of these processes on the fabric surface. A t extile fabric is rubbed with a probe of a multidirectional roughness m eter, and the signal is studied in the frequency domain. The calculate d autospectrum shows several peaks that correspond to the kind of weav e or knit and the fabric density. The peak height changes with the pro cess intensity and decreases after sanding or raising, due to a modifi cation of the fabric profile. The multidirectional roughness meter pro vides information about the fabric surface state and the fundamental d irections of fabric relief, which depend on the kind of weave or knit. Observations with a scanning electron microscope and edge extraction of hairs produced by sanding or raising are used to interpret this inf ormation.