Hand Evaluation by Instrumentation

Abstract

In textile industry, performance of the fabrics is still out of the engineering design, because of the difficulty in designing the proper mechanical properties of fabrics, and also of the difficulty in evaluating the performance where the evaluation has been done by a sensory method named “handfeel” by experts.In this article, recent developments in the Hand Evaluation and Standardization Committee (Chairman Sueo Kawabata, The Text. Mach. Soc. of Japan) during three years are introduced.The progress of the research is as following.1. Definition of primary hand feeling for clothing fabrics.2. Selection of the standard samples of hand feeling by 20 experts from textile industries in Japan.3. Representation of hand by numerical value (H.V., 0-10).4. Evaluation of H.V. by the experts for each of 1000 samples which were collected from many companies.5. Researches on physical and mechanical properties of fabrics especially on characterization method of those “non-linear” properties. Each of tensile, bending, shearing, compressional and surface properties are represented by two or three characteristic values.6. Mathematical and statistical analyses to join the experts' H.V. and the physical values.7. Formulas to translate physical values to H.V. were obtained.8. The following applications are introduced .1) Application to the establishment of the formulas for calculating the total hand values from those primary hand values.2) Analyses of the good quality fabric.3) Application to the establishment of the formulas for calculating the hand values of knitted fabric for men's out wear.4) Application of the formulas for hand calculation to the textured-knitted fabrics.5) Application to the establishment of the formulas for calculating the hand values of silk fabric for Kimono.6) Application to the process analisis in the textile mill, for example, the relation, between the finishing condition. and the hand of the fabrics finished, and the effect of the type of weaving machines such as shuttle loom, jet loom and rapier loom on the hand of the fabric produced by those.