CHARACTERIZING OXIDATIVELY DAMAGED COTTON FABRICS .1. A METHOD FOR ESTIMATING RELATIVE FABRIC DAMAGE

Treating cotton fabrics with electrogenerated oxygen at a Pt anode pro vides a laboratory method for simulating the ''catalytic damage'' phen omenon. Samples of cotton voile were treated in this manner using diff erent current and temperature conditions to damage the fabric. Diffuse reflectance infrared spectra of a series of these samples treated at 80-degrees-C were then analyzed using fuzzy clustering, an unsupervise d classification method. The resulting classes were assigned a number (0 to 4) nominally indicating the extent of fabric damage as measured by this spectroscopic technique. This series of spectra together with the damage class numbers was then used to construct a calibration set by principal components regression. The calibration was successfully v alidated with a similar set of samples and also used to predict the re lative fabric damage on other oxidatively affected voile samples.