Journal of Industrial Textiles

The knee is the most used joint in the human body and is also most prone to injuries. Knee braces are medical devices used in the treatment of some form of injuries providing compression and warmth to the joint thus promoting healing. They can also be used for protection in several contact sports. At the moment there are no regulations governing the textile materials used in braces. The authors believe that knitted spacer fabrics have the desirable mechanical and comfort properties which could make these materials suitable for some medical applications. Commercially available knee braces have been tested and analyzed for their mechanical as well as thermophysiological properties. A range of novel spacer fabrics have been designed, developed, and characterized for comparison with commercial products. It has been found that knitted spacers can be engineered in terms of yarn type and structure used in each of the three layers in order to match and even outperform the properties exhibited by commercially available products, such as neoprene and other knitted fabrics, including composite materials. The test results obtained for a range of existing and novel products studied in this work have been explained in terms of their raw material, structure, and finishing treatments applied to them.

Textile materials are increasingly used in various industries. In these applications, the surfaces of textile materials play a key role, because a range of performance properties depends on surface characteristics. As with many other types of materials, the surface properties of textiles can be readily altered by the treatment of the materials with gas plasma, without impairment of their bulk mechanical properties. This article presents examples of new approaches to functionalization of textiles using plasma-enhanced modifications. Examples are given of the work on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) nonwoven materials. Micrographs, obtained by scanning probe microscopy (SPM) and environmental scanning electron microscopy (ESEM) are presented to demonstrate changes in the surface topography, surface chemistry, and surface wettability of PET nonwovens. The great potential for significant improvements in the properties of textiles by plasma-enhanced modification is highly promising.

Electrospinning is used to produce polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) fibers. Electrospun nano and micro sized fibers are collected on nonwoven fabrics to form a web and membranes. Optimization is carried out by considering some of the parameters, such as voltage, spinning time, polymer solution, distance between the collector and the needle. Beading effect, effect of solution viscosity, and voltage are investigated. Mechanical and thermal properties are measured by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Surface tension properties are examined. Glass transition and melting temperature are increased with the addition of nanoclay to PVA. Nanoclay also increases the barrier properties and thermal stability of PVA fibers. Yarn samples are produced by twisting nano-micro fibers. Tensile strength of the yarn samples is measured.

A neural network method of analyzing cross-sectional images of a wool/silk blended yarn is studied. The research has two major components: the process of original yarn cross-sectional images including image enhancement and shape filtering; and the determination of characteristic parameters for distinguishing wool and silk fibers in the enhanced yarn cross-sectional images. A neural network computing approach, single-layer perceptrons, is used for learning the target parameters. The established neural network model features a good capability of tolerance and learning, in contrast to traditional methods of image pattern recognition. The study indicates that preparation of the yarn sample slices is critically important to obtain undistorted fiber images and to ensure the accuracy of fiber recognition by the neural network model. The research concludes that the overall error estimate for recognizing wool or silk fiber is 5%.