The Study On Fabric Softness Assessment Of Towel Textile Products

The towel textile products is not only an important component of Chinese hometextile products, but also one of the main categories of Chinese exported home textiles.With the development of modern science and technology, people’s quality of life havebeen continually improved, at the same time its requirement for the home textileproducts have also changed from practicability to the comfortableness. It have beenrequired not only having the function of practical; we pay more attention to its skinfriendly quality and comfortableness. Therefore, the towel products have been putforward higher requirements about its softness. But the study on test method abouttowel softness is still insufficient, and it is unmatched with consumer demand and thetechnology development of towel products. The softness test and assessment means oftowel fabric has been mainly based on people’s hand feeling experienceover a long period of time. There is no clearly authority assessment criterion ontowel’s softness in national standard. Therefore the towel fabric softness assessmentstill needs further research from the testing assessment perspective. According to thisproblem, the author did some relevant research about the abric softness of towel inthis topic.According to the principle of compression and tensile measures, a simple devicefor towel softness test has been designed to find and explore the feasibility of towelsoftness assessment. Putting the towel goes through the circular hole, imitate theflexibility of subjective evaluation on the effects of hands’ touching. It fully reflectsa series of mechanical properties of towel fabric under the action of low stress. Thismeans not only provides a large information capacity but also simple andcomprehensive. Based on this to get the optimal test speed, gasket size and ring-holesize, meanwhile this paper put forward nine characteristic indexes of towel fabricsoftness:before contact shift X1, rising height X2, rising tension X3, peak X4, peakposition X5, rate of rise X6, rate of decrease X7, reversion rate X8, efficacy X9.Testing the softness of54kinds of towels which supported by Zhe Jiang Grace.Then using SPSS software to compare the indexes of towel fabric softness with the test results of the drapability, rigidity, compressibility and surface friction, it shows ahigher correlation between these two kinds of indexes. The bending property,compress property, recovery property and friction property of towel fabric could bepresented by its fabric softness indexes that the author put forward in this paper.The research on towel softness is based on main factor analysis method andcluster method to comprehensively reflect the towel fabric softness. According to therotating factor loading array and its factor expression, using main factor analysismethod and getting the three main factors of towel fabric softness, they are soft factor,mild factor and stiff factor. Accounding to the expression of coefficient factor score, itcan calculate the comprehensive score S and rank of every factor. Then using thecluster method to divide the54different kinds of towel fabrics into four categories,and analyzing every kind of towel’s structure characteristics, and combined thecomprehensive evaluation value with clustering results of analysis to assess the fabricsoftness of towel textile products. At the same time, their handfeel properties havebeen put in order by use the subjective evaluation method. Subjective and objectiveresults have good consistency, it explained that the assessment means presented inthis paper is reasonable and accuracy, preliminary realized the objective evaluation oftowel softness.