Abrasion Studies of Sized Cotton Yarns Before and After Weaving

Abstract

Cotton warp yams treated with various sizing formulations were subjected to weaving trials. Warp yams extracted from the greige fabrics (woven yarns) and those from their antecedent loom beams (feed yarns) were subjected to abrasion resistance mea surements with the Zweigle yam abrader and TRI's multistation cyclic tensile abrader (CTA), as well as to tensile measurements of breaking force. CTA abrasion resistance values were much more sensitive to differences in size treatments than Zweigle values, and there were significant differences in the rankings by the two methods. In general, correlations were good between weaving performance and CTA values for both feed and woven yams and Zweigle values for feed yams only. A statistical analysis was developed for finding the fraction of "most vulnerable" yam specimens for each sample. Using CTA data, this fraction showed good correlation with weaving performance for both feed and woven yams. Using CTA measure ents of the abrasion resistance of warp yams from greige fabrics to evaluate weavin performance could significantly shorten the time currently devoted to weaving trials. Weaving performance tended to improve with increasing relative tensile breaking force of the feed yams, but there was no such correlation for the woven yams.