The development of a quick dry fabric for outdoors garments
Engineered clothing systems are one of the major textile research areas. These systems have a huge potential in providing protection and comfort to the wearer. Basically, multi-layered fabric technique is used, in which each layer contributes a substantial moisture removal function. The process of moisture removal is greatly affected by the surrounding conditions, such as pressure, temperature and humidity. If these quantities are much higher than the inner microclimate, the moisture removal process is affected, due to reduced hydrostatic pressure. However, the technology of heating in textile systems is widely available but not used as a way of improving and controlling moisture removal. The project main objective is to investigate the feasibility of using heating elements together with knitted spacer structures so as to maintain and transfer moisture by capillary effect in order to be used for moisture management textiles. To achieve this a mathematical model to study the moisture transfer process was created and simulated results based on knitted spacer fabric with a construction of 2 tucks and 2 ends was found to be significant. It showed that application of 4W heating using a carefully designed Thermoknit knitted elements which was integrated on the inner side of the spacer fabric successfully improved the moisture transfer by 30% per 11.5 X 11.5 cm sample size. This was further studied on the novel, constructed test rig with two mini-chambers that created controlled climatic conditions as experienced when a textile is situated between the inner microclimate and the outside environment. The same conditions and properties were used for the spacer fabric sample and found to coincide with numerical results. A prototype garment was created using the 2-tuck-2-end spacer fabric with integrated Thermoknit heater elements on the inner side of the garment.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations