Study On Contact Comfort Of Wet Fabrics

Clothing comfort is a very complex and nebulous subject, the state of comfort can only be achieved when the most complex interactions between a range of physiological, psychological, physical and environmental factors have taken place in a satisfactory manner. It broadly involves three aspects: thermophysiological comfort, contact comfort, and visual comfort. And the contact comfort has a direct influence on the human body, it is the elicitation of various neural sensations when a textile comes into contact with skin. In some cases, the clothing will be wet due to human sweats, the rain, or other reasons, and the fabrics surface properties will have a certain degree of change, thus the contact comfort of wet fabrics is very important to human body.In this paper, 21 woven fabrics and 7 knitted fabrics popular in current market were selected as specimens, the subjective and objective assessment was respectively and combined applied to systematic evaluate and analyze the contact comfort of the wet fabrics. In the objective assessment, an attachment to Instron tensile tester was developed for the static and kinetic coefficient of specimen under standard and different moisture regains, the influences of material category, the yarn count, the weave, the density and moisture regain to fabric surface friction properties were explored. Then the air permeability, the moisture permeability and the heat transfer properties of fabrics were measured, and the correlation between these objective properties and the basic structure of the fabrics parameters was analyzed. In the subjective assessment, the evaluation words, the environment and staff were selected, the SD evaluation method was used, and the basic structure of the fabrics parameters influence on the contact comfort parameters, and the state of wet fabrics contact comfort were studied. Then the results of objective and subjective evaluation were analyzed by correlation, in order to know which objective parameters have a significant correlation with the subjective contact comfort.The following conclusions can be obtained: the friction properties of fabrics are related to the surface performance; generally speaking, the friction coefficient values of fabrics with roughness surface are higher than those of the fabrics with smooth surface. With increasing moisture regain level, the values of friction coefficient show the trend of increase. The air permeability, the moisture permeability and the heat transfer properties of fabrics are related to the basic structure of the fabrics parameters. The fabrics contact comfort is related to the material category, the yarn count, the weave, the density, thickness and so on. The fabric contact comfort shows the decline trend in the wet condition. The fabric contact comfort is related to the surface properties and moisture permeability.