Compression and Recovery Functional Application for the Sportswear Fabric

Abstract

A sportswear fabric should have good stretch and recovery behaviour. This study facilitates an effective design and development of high-stretch sportswear using different knitted structure. Nine types of knitted fabrics were produced by varying the type of fibre and type of structure. An experiment work is done to study the fabric size, stretch and elastic recovery properties. The statistical analysis showed that type of fibre and type of knitted structure significantly influence the fabric stretch. Plain structure fabric showed higher stretch value than rib and interlock-knitted fabric. The high stitch density caused by reduce stretch value in the course- and wale-wise due to yarn floating rather than overlapping influenced the weight and thickness of knitted fabrics. The elastic recovery analysis indicated that the recovery value of plain-knitted structure with polyester-spandex blend is higher among studied fabrics. However, the recovery value decreased over time in comparison with stretch value.