A family of synthetic elastic fibers, designated spandex fibers, has been developed, providing new degrees of sheerness and effective "power" in elastic fabrics. These fibers have segmented polyurethane structures. They are durable, they are white and accept dye readily, and they can be set by heat. The development of these fibers has led to new textile technology and to new uses for elastic fabrics.

A technique is described for the determination of yarn abrasion-resistance free from other wear factors such as flexibility, strength, elongation, and fabric construction. The procedure is based on a sheet of parallel yarns wound under controlled tension and subsequently abraded to failure on a Taber Abraser. The method has been used to evaluate the effect of yarn properties as well as fiber type on yarn abrasion-resistance. Results on yarns correlate well with the Taber abrasion-resistance of fabrics made from these yarns, and can be used to determine the inherent yarn abrasion-resistance without the necessitiy of fabric preparation. THE GENERAL PROBLEM of evaluating the wear-resistance of textiles has received considerable attention both in the United States and other countries [4,5,6,7,14,15]. In virtually all cases it has been necessary to conduct field tests in end uses to obtain information on wear, because of the difficulty in correlating data observed in the laboratory with wear observed in service. This difficulty probably resides in the fact that wear is a composite result involving abrasion, flexing, strength, elongation, and other factors, all exerting their individual effects simultaneously, and it is almost impossible to set up a laboratory test which will include all of these factors at the same time and to the proper extent.One of the most important of the factors contributing to wear is believed to be abrasion, and it has seemed desirable to measure this property free from other factors affecting wear and thereby to contribute to the understanding of the more general problem.Abrasion-testing has usually been confined to fabrics, which in turn are relatively complex structures, which makes tests inconvenient to carry out and difficult to understand. A test applicable to yarns would be accordingly quite desirable. Testers for this purpose have been described by Walker and Olmstead [ 16] and by Matthes and Keworkian [ 111.These testers, however, do not measure abrasion free from other factors but, rather, measure a combination of abrasion-resistance and other properties such as flexibility and strength, and are unsatisfactory for this reason. Hamburger and Lee [8] developed a test which presumably meaures simple abrasion of yarns. They used a sheet of parallel yarns wound under controlled tension on a panel which could be abraded on a Taber Abraser. The preparation of the yarn sheet was comparatively simple and the sample comprising a number of ends was more representative than single-end tests. Relative abrasionresistance was calculated as a &dquo;durability coefficient&dquo; obtained by determining loss in yarn strength after progressive degrees of abrasion on a succession of samples. It is accordingly a comparatively long and expensive test.It was the purpose of this work to develop a rapid yarn abrasion test which would not be influenced by other wear factors and to use this test to evaluate the effect of yarn properties on abrasion-resistance. The procedure was similar to that described by Hamb...

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