Predicting the tensile strength of polyester/cotton blended woven fabrics using feed forward back propagation artificial neural networks

Abstract

Tensile strength plays a vital role in determining the mechanical behavior of woven fabrics. In this study, two artificial neural networks have been designed to predict the warp and weft wise tensile strength of polyester cotton blended fabrics. Various process and material related parameters have been considered for selection of vital few input parameters that significantly affect fabric tensile strength. A total of 270 fabric samples are woven with varying constructions. Application of nonlinear modeling technique and appreciable volume of data sets for training, testing and validating both prediction models resulted in best fitting of data and minimization of prediction error. Sensitivity analysis has been carried out for both models to determine the contribution percentage of input parameters and evaluating the most impacting variable on fabric strength.