Evaluation And Study On Thermal And Moisture Comfort Of Diaper

The thermal and moisture comfort of diaper effects baby’s health and growth. But there is no research in this field. So it is very important to preliminarily research the thermal and moisture comfort of diapers.In this paper six common diapers were selected to study. Their physical properties such as Thickness, moisture permeability, absorption time and the rate of exhausting moisture were tested in this paper. A test platform made by a homothermal plastic model which can wear diaper was used to simulate the situation of real baby wearing diaper. The real urinating situation was simulated by injecting the manufactured urine using a injector. The distribution and transformation of temperature and humidity in diaper microclimate was tested by a Temperature and Humidity Data Logger.3indexes defined based on the transformation curve of humidity were used to evaluate the thermal and moisture comfort of6diapers. And the interdependency between physical properties and thermal/moisture comfort was analyzed. In the part of subjective evaluating,20experimenters were selected to evaluate the comfort of some temperature and humidity and give the comfort value. Based on these data a figure of comfort range in fixed values of temperature and humidity were drawn by Matlab which can evaluate the comfort of diaper microclimate.Results:The temperature and humidity in microclimate aren’t well distributed. The temperature in bottom is the highest, in inguina is the lowest. The humidity in hypogastriuin and inguina is larger, and in bottom is much smaller; In inguinal region the microclimate changes dramatically after every wetting. The microclimate is wet and cool which is harmful for baby’s health after the third wetting (about240ml urine); The moisture permeability and the rate of exhausting moisture have good interdependency with the thermal and moisture comfort. The interdependency between thickness, absorption time and the thermal and moisture comfort isn’t very obvious. The figure of comfort range calculated by subjective evaluation is very exact and it can apply to evaluate the comfort of diaper microclimate.