Polylactic Acid Knitted Performance Testing And Drape Properties

With the improvement of environment-protecting consciousness, people take more attention to the development and study of natural biodegradable materials. PLA fiber, which is made from natural resources like corn-starch, and can be regenerated from beginning to the end during the whole production process, is one of the most popular biodegradable materials. This fiber has been regarded as "Environment-Friendly material of the 21st century" because of its abundant raw-material and unique properties.PLA fiber material has many excellent properties, such as excellent wickability, good mechanical properties, low flammability, low energy loss, good degradability, good mildew resistance, excellent UV resistance and so on, which provides a new chance for the development of textile industry.In this paper, the production, the structure and properties of PLA fiber were presented firstly. On the basis of the introduction above, we tested and analyzed the fundamental properties of knitted fabric with different blending ratio, such as tensile property, abrasion property and drape property that is studied in traditional way, also tested their bending property and tearing property through FAST tester.The paper focuses on evaluating drape properties of five different PLA/Cotton knitted fabrics. Transfer the describing indexes that were selected to describe drape to data that can be analyzed through digital image processing and Matlab. Then utilize the factor analysis method to abstract 3 main factors which can reflect most of the information of 26 indexes from all of the describing factors, and calculated drape scores of five different PLA/Cotton knitted fabrics. Finally explained the testing result depend on bending property and tearing property.With the improvement of the living demand and the decrease of the production cost, people will do further study concerning to the PLA products. Due to the influence of foreign fashion culture, knitted fabric has become more popular. Therefore, PLA knitted fabric will have a rosy future.