THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF MEAN DIAMETER AND COEFFICIENT OF VARIATIONOF SALE LOTS IN DETERMINING THE POTENTIAL SKIN COMFORT OF WOOL FABRICS

Previous work on the fibre diameter distribution of wool has identifie d that skin comfort is strongly related to the coarse edge in the diam eter distribution. A study using 297 sale lot samples mainly in the 20 -24 micron range found that the coarse edge in the diameter distributi on of an individual sale lot could be predicted using either a lognorm al distribution (giving an average discrepancy in prediction of 11.6%) or using a Gaussian distribution (average discrepancy 20.5%). Using b oth these models it was further shown that for Australian fleece wools a one micrometre change in mean diameter has the same effect on the c oarse edge as approximately a 3 to 8 percentage point shift in CV of d iameter.