Comfort Evaluation of T-shirt Type Underwear Made of Spun Silk Yarn

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to clarify the characteristics concerning comfortable clothes of T-shirts with the knitted fabric made of spun silk yarn, in order to develop a comfortable T-shirts made of spun silk yarn.The underwear is clothes that touch the skin directly. Therefore, stimulation according to physical characteristics of the underwear has a big physiological, psychological influence on human. Requirements of comfortable underwear are the following features.The touch sensation is to be soft. The clothing compression doesn't become tightening for the human body. The climate in clothes doesn't get stuffy easily.There is few research reports about evaluation of clothing comfort of silk fabric, though silk fabric is well-known as an excellent cloth that has material characteristics to fit human's health. We measured physical properties of three knitted fabric(spun silk yarn, raw silk(filament), cotton), tactile feeling, and physiological responses and investigated the evaluation of clothing comfort from their interrelation. Consequently, as for the shirt of the spun silk yarn, we demonstrated experimentally that it has excellent characteristics as the underwear from the viewpoint of the physiological and psychological clothing comfort. With experimental study of the autonomic nerve activity, we confirmed that the shirt of the spun silk yarn afford the thermo physiological comfort feeling to human although there was a problem in the touch compared with the cotton shirt. We obtained the conclusion that the underwear of the spun silk yarn was the best for clothes at the summer time.