Optimal design of superfine polyamide fabric by electrostatic flocking technology

Abstract

The use of superfine fibers as piles to produce flocked fabrics is underreported despite their excellent properties. Therefore, a superfine polyamide fiber was used for piles to produce flocked fabric in this study, and a full factorial design was employed with three design factors at three levels to optimize the process parameters in terms of flocking density. The flock density is found, experimentally, to increase with the decrease of flocking distance and the increase of field strength and flocking time. A ternary linear equation is also established in this study based upon the regression analysis on experimental results and verified by F-test showing that it has remarkable significance. Comparison with experimental values shows that the regression equation possesses high accuracy. The optimum parameters are empirically and experimentally determined as: flocking distance of 7 cm, field strength of 60 kV, and flocking time of 10 s.