Measurement And Analysis Of Adhesion Property Between Fabric And Skin In Wet Conditions

When people sweat a lot, shirts or underwears always get soaked with sweat and attached to human skin. This kind of adhesion phenomena is common in our everyday life. It causes obvious uncomfortabilty both physiologically and psychologically. Nowadays both domestic and foreign fabric manufacturers are committed to developing functional fabrics which can absorb enough moisture, be quick-dry and get separated from skin as quickly as possible. However, in face of thousands kinds of new functional fabric products, the degree of comfortability or functionality of the fabrics can not be convincingly proved mainly due to lack of testing methods and basic theories. This also increases the cost of production and research. Therefore, the measurement of fabric adhesion property with human skin in totally wet conditions is indispensable in the fabric thermal-wet comfort area and plays a significant role for functional fabric research.When saturated with sweat, fabrics performs huge tangential adhesion force with skin, and it is always difficult to separate the wet fabric from skin when the direction of outer force are totally parallel with fabric surface. In that point, characterizing the adhesion force that is vertical to skin surface is most critical to help us understand fabric-skin adhension properties.The wet adhesion apparatus developed to test dynamic change of adhesion force can depicts time/distance-force curve called adhesion curve; it can also accumulate maximum adhesion force, distance and work. After many repeated experiments and comparing various fabric adhesion curves, the operation specifications and standard were formulated to standardize the method.Through observation and analysis of shape feature of force-distance curves, the curve can be divided into three parts:fast increase part, slow increase part zone and separation zone. The difference between knitted fabrics and woven fabrics were more reflected in the second zone-slow increase zone showing that the yield point if woven fabrics were not obvious and the shape was steeper. Based on bending and tensile data tested by K.ES system, it was found that the deformation of fabric affects fabric adhesion property at low separation rate remarkably. The deformation of woven fabric was small so that the distinction of force became smaller when the separation rate increased. For ductile knitted fabric, the change of adhesion property was not large. It was also analyzed that fabrics that had large tensile work and small bending rigidity the maximum adhesion was small and distance was large causing the initial slope of this adhesion curves was small; yield point was obvious; the second zone became larger.When the wet fabrics separate from skin, fabrics need to overcome the work done on the skin by water. Different kinds of fabrics need different energy to overcome the work. Therefore water absorption of fabrics and the existence form of water in the fabric is very important for fabric-sweat-skin system. It is essential to study maximum water absorption and water state. The maximum water content of16woven fabrics that were regularly changing and10knitted fabrics were tested to analyze adhesion property. It indicated that the bond form between fabric and water and the transfer of water impacted fabric adhesion property. Based on the bond form and adhesion data it was also found that fiber content and warp/weft density affected adhesion property. For the plain woven fabrics, when warp/weft density were153/89å'Œ11115/59(/5cm),maximum force was too much bigger which was not good for the separation between fabric and skin. For hydrophobic knitted fabric, the maximum force was small and water was easy to transfer making the adhesion force was much smaller than hydrophilic fabrics. And in the case of the same fiber composition, adhesion force for knitted fabrics of regular structure was greater than tuck fabrics.In this paper, the circumstance of the reaction between fabrics and skin in wet condition was visualized and an apparatus was developed to test dynamic adhesion force. Also a series of tests and analysis were done about some factors that influenced adhesion property. It played an important role to set up more systematic and comprehensive evaluation method of thermal wet comfort and was beneficial to development of sportswear.