Fabric Dyeing and Finishing

A powerful tool for fabric dyeing & finishing

Sensitivity - Experimental Approach

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A client sent 13 fabric samples to be tested by PhabrOmeter®, and provided the following information:

They are the same 100% cotton fabrics with wrinkle recovery finish; some are top-softened and others are not;
Fabric #13 being a heavier twill and is considered the worst in hand rating out of all 13 samples, even though it has some softener treatment.

The test results by PhabrOmeter® are listed in the table below:

Clearly the PhabrOmeter® data distinctly identified the differences due to the softener treatment between the fabrics.

Fabric Hand Attributes Ranking vs. Panel Rating

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Meanwhile the client from the previous session, also provided more detailed evaluation results by a panel the client has employed in terms of the three individual fabric attributes, as in the tables

Panel Rule:

Fabric bending corresponding to Fabric Resilience by PhabrOmeter®. The comparison between the two results is provided in the following two tables.

There are some agreements between the two results. However as known that softener treatment indeed impact the fabric hand, hence its resilence, and PhabrOmeter® Resilence values clearly divide the fabrics into two groups with/without the treatment, whereas the panel failed to distinguish that.
Fabric Softness corresponding to Fabric Softness by PhabrOmeter®

Similarly PhabrOmeter® Softness values show unambiguously that softener treatment improved the fabric softness. Also Fabric #13, being treated with less softener, is the worst in softness when compared with other non-treated fabrics.
Fabric Slickness corresponding to Fabric Smoothness by PhabrOmeter®

PhabrOmeter® Smoothness values indicated that the impact on fabric softness by the softener treatment is mixed between fabrics.

Relative Hand Value - fabric overall performance

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Continue from the previous session.

The effect of top-softening can be observed by comparing the results for the previous session Table group A to those for group B. The Relative Hand Value showed a dramatic overall improvement for the top-softened samples. The drape, softness and stiffness factors all showed dramatic changes with the application of top softener.

Now you can see from above table that the order of overall performance ranking given by PhabrOmeter® is the same as Panel's bending and softness rating order.

Conclusions

The human hand panel was able to distinguish subtleties in hand that were also detected by the PhabrOmeter®. A direct comparison can be made between the top-softened samples and the samples without top softener. SO, the PhabrOmeter® appear to be very useful for determining differences after fabric dyeing and finishing as well as detecting the changes in hand due to top softener.

Physical Meanings of the 8 principal components

The fabric hand attributes are mathematically determined. However, to make the system easier to accept, we still use the common sensory terms such as resilience, softness and smoothness.
It is proved that there are total 8 such attributes v1, v2, v3 … v8. As the first step, we only identify the first and also the most important 3, i.e., v1=Resilience, v2 = Softness and v3 = Smoothness, in that order.
For more comprehensive comparison, we use all 8 components to calculate the Relative Hand Value, and to construct the Fingerprint for the fabrics.

Testing Repeatability & Data Variation

Fabric Sample Measurement Repeatability

As show in the table above, the repeatability of PhabrOmeter® in measuring the fabrics is highly consistent.

Curve Properties Coefficient of Variation (CV) %

Note: Value less than 5% consider excellent data; less than 10% is good data; value great than 10% may need to be re-do the measurement.