Effects of fiber type and yarn production technique on pile yarn and carpet performances

Abstract

Pile yarns, which are commonly used for machine-made carpets, are produced from fibers such as wool, polypropylene, acrylic, polyamide, and polyester by using different yarn production techniques. In this study, drawn textured polyester pile yarns (DTY), bulked continuous polyester pile yarns (BCF PES), and bulked continuous polypropylene pile yarns (BCF PP) were produced with trilobal cross section, same number of filaments and linear density. In order to determine optimum fiber type and yarn production technique for machine-made carpets, both physical, thermal properties of pile yarn samples and resilience, appearance retention of carpet samples were investigated. Breaking strength-elongation, crimp contraction and shrinkage tests, were applied to the pile yarn samples. Compression/recovery, dynamic loading, static loading, hexapod tumbler, and soiling tests were also carried out to analyse carpet resilience and appearance retention performances. According to the yarn physical test results, it was revealed that pile yarn samples have similar performance and DTY samples have highest crimp contraction and shrinkage values among all pile yarn samples. Better compression/recovery properties and less thickness loss after dynamic and static loading tests were observed with DTY PES carpet samples. However, BCF PP carpet samples showed better resilience behaviour than other carpet samples. Hexapod test results showed that DTY PES carpet samples have the best appearance retention results. For soiling performance, it was observed that there was no significant difference between the carpet samples.