Interaction of wash-ageing and use of fabric softener for drapeability of knitted fabrics

Abstract

This study involves subjective and objective evaluation of drapeability of knitted textiles during the life cycle of a fabric. The life cycle of fabric was represented by forty laundry cycles in this paper. We examined the influence of knitting construction, fibre fineness, number of washing cycles and use of the fabric softener during the laundry cycle on the drape coefficient of the PET and viscose knitted fabrics, and also investigated the order of influence of these four factors on drape coefficient. A high degree of correlation was found between subjective score of drapeability and drape coefficient. We defined the tracking criterion to investigate the relevance between subjective drape score and mechanical parameters. An intelligent system based on fuzzy logic for correlating the drapeability and most relevant mechanical parameter was developed.