Comparison of Total Hand of Single Knitted Fabrics Made from lincLITE® and Conventional Wool Yarns

Abstract

Two sets of single wool weft-knitted fabrics made from conventional yarn and lin cLITE®, which was developed by the Wool Research Organization of New Zealand in an effort to make a softer and bulkier wool, are used to analyze a total hand evaluation model for outerwear knitted fabrics. Mechanical properties and total hand value are measured on the KES-FB system, and three kinds of fuzzy membership functions (a decreasing half- Cauchy equation and two linear functions, increasing or decreasing) are used to calculate fuzzified overall hand values of the knitted fabrics. The weighted factor vectors surveyed by a Korean panel are strongly related to those of a New Zealand panel. Based on these surveys, we calculate the total hand value of the KES-FB and the fuzzy model. The latter results show that the bulkiness of single wool fabric knitted from lincLITE yarn is a little higher than the same fabric knitted from conventional yarn. Furthermore, the fuzzy total hand evaluation from the Korean panel is highly correlated with the result of the New Zealanders.