Thermal contact properties of 2-yarn fleece knitted fabrics

Abstract

When a person touches a garment, heat flow occurs between the human body and the fabric, with the resulting warm-cool feeling as the first sensation. This transient and dynamic thermal-contact feeling should be carefully investigated, since it strongly affects people first impressions and subsequent choices when buying garments. It is possible to find papers on the thermal contact properties of various fabrics, from woven shirt fabrics to underwear types; in this paper the warm-cool feeling of 2-yarn fleece knitted fabrics, which are widely used for outdoor garments, have been investigated, and to the best of our knowledge this has not been studied before. Four different fleecy fabrics were selected with varying ground and loop yarn combination, which is 100% cotton or PET/cotton blend in accordance with the most common, commercially available fleece-knitted fabric types. The fabrics are rinsed and subjected to raising treatment to produce typical fleecy fabric, and the influence of yarn type and raising treatment on warm-cool feeling is objectively determined by measurements performed by an instrument developed at the end of the 1990s. The measurements are taken in the dry and wet state of the fabrics. It is found that raising treatment is the primary factor determining the thermal contact feeling of fleecy fabrics; the yarn type and fibre blend is less important.