Development Of Knitted Structures Based On Biomimetics For Heat And Moisture Comfort Clothing

In recent years, moisture-transfer and quick-drying fabrics in sports and leisure apparel are widely used; many kinds of wet conduction fibers and fabrics have already come onto the market. It is essential to develop knitted leisure fabrics based on branching network of natural plants about water transport properties.Plants have extremely efficient water transport systems. Based on this unique water transport principle, many plant structure fabrics are designed to improve liquid-transport and quick-drying properties mimicking plants' branching structure. The concept of designing bionic structures in the fabrics is to make yarn path simulating plant branching network, so that water transmission path through fabrics has the same principle with the transmission path of plants from the stem to the leaves. Different loops number of back and front sides of fabrics provides a good way of branching: The front side of fabric with more loops increases surface area, simulating leaves of plant to evaporate water, while the back side tucks to produce more branches connecting to the front side. Therefore, moisture transfer in fabrics produces a point-to-surface path.In this paper, six kinds of bionic structures with different loops number proportion of front and back sides of fabric are developed. To measure Thermal-wet Comfort ability of these novel fabrics, many performance tests including wicking, quick-drying, water vapor permeability, air resistance, and thermal conductivity test are taken. Furthermore, the results showed different loops number ratio of both sides of fabric can produce different structural parameters of knitted fabrics such as mesh number, mesh size, mesh distribution, and they influence the thermal and moisture comfortable properties of the fabrics.It is concluded that the thermal-wet comfort properties of all plant structures in this paper are better than the contrastive structure. In addition, different loops number of back and front sides of fabrics possesses different abilities, thermal-wet comfort of fabrics have the best performance when the ratio of loops number of front and back sides comes to 2:1. Whether the ratio are greater or less than 2:1, fabrics' thermal-wet comfort performance degrade. The closer the ratio to 2:1, the worse the performance is. Therefore, when designing moisture-transfer and quick-drying fabrics, we should take into account that different loops ratio influence the fabrics properties. Only when select the proper loops ratio can really serve to improve the thermal-wet comfort performance, thus improve the wearing comfort.The emulation of plant structure in textile fabrics has the potential of developing fabrics with superb liquid water transport properties. Based on the tests conducted in this study, it was evident that fabrics made of novel structure in comparison with conventional structure, possess a significantly greater liquid transport and quick drying ability, which are highly beneficial to the thermal comfort of wear or sportswear.