When the human hand touches a garment that is at a different temperature than the skin, heat exchange occurs between the hand and the fabric, and the warm-cool feeling is the very first sensation. This transient transfer of energy depends on the contact interface between the skin and the fabric, and the contact interface depends on many morphological and structural parameters like fiber morphology or yarn and fabric structure. This paper describes a new experimental device for measuring heat absorption of textile materials in a transient state. The link between the transient thermal behavior and the tribological properties of fabrics is then made to show the influence of contact interface and therefore the influence of morphological and structural parameters on heat transfer. This investigation involves two cotton varieties (Pima of Morocco and Kaba S of Benin), two yarn structures (single and two-ply yarns), and three stitch lengths of jersey fabrics.

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Comfort is a major selling point for clothes, and tactile comfort is essential; a fabric must be pleasant to the touch. Several textile finishing 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 describes a tribological method for investigating sanding and raising, and brings to light the effects of these processes on the fabric surface. A textile fabric is rubbed with a probe of a multidirectional roughness meter, and the signal is studied in the frequency domain. The calculated autospectrum shows several peaks that correspond to the kind of weave or knit and the fabric density. The peak height changes with the process intensity and decreases after sanding or raising, due to a modification of the fabric profile. The multidirectional roughness meter provides information about the fabric surface state and the fundamental directions 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 information.

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