Comfort properties of fabrics knitted from a two-ply yarn derived from abacá and cotton

Abstract

In the present study, the comfort properties of knitted fabrics made from a two-ply yarn comprising a paper yarn and a cotton yarn were investigated. The objective was to elucidate the characteristics of paper yarn in comparison with cotton in terms of the design and development of comfortable and ecofriendly textiles that directly contact the skin. A two-ply yarn comprising a paper yarn made from abacá and a cotton yarn was prepared. Five fabrics with different proportions of paper were prepared by changing the knitting ratio of the two-ply yarn to a 100% cotton yarn. The mechanical properties (tensile, shearing, bending, compression, surface, contact area, and air permeability properties) and various thermal and moisture-transport properties of the fabric samples were determined. Those investigations revealed that the surface roughness increased, the friction coefficient decreased, the contact area decreased (in both the dry and wet state), the air permeability increased, the thermal conductivity increased, and the moisture diffusivity increased as the proportion of paper yarn increased. The fabric consisting of only the two-ply yarn was noticeably stiffer than the fabrics that also contained a pure cotton yarn. The results suggest the possibility of developing clothes that feel comfortable next to the skin, even when wet (e.g. underwear and socks) by knitting the two-ply yarn in a well-balanced ratio with cotton yarns.

Prediction of clothing comfort sensation with different activities based on fuzzy comprehensive evaluation of variable weight

“…However, to date, this effect has not been quantified in detail. In terms of prediction models, several modeling methods have been applied to build a model to predict the clothing comfort sensation, such as multiple linear regression, 5,12 backpropagation neural networks, 13–17 the radial basis neural network, 18 least squares support vector machines, 19 fuzzy theory, 20 the hybrid algorithm, 15,21 etc. Multiple linear regression can explore the contributions of the sensory factors on the clothing comfort sensation by calculating the determination coefficient.…”