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Abstract
This paper investigated wicking properties of cotton-acrylic rotor yarns and knitted fabrics. The effect of yarn wicking on wicking of fabric in both wale and course directions was also discussed. One way ANOVA results of the experimental study suggested that wicking abilities of yarns and fabrics increased with the increase in acrylic content in the blends and with the use of coarse yarns. Besides, yarn wicking had a significant effect on fabric wicking.
Keywords
Yarn wicking, fabric wicking, cotton-acrylic yarn blends, rotor yarns, single jersey fabric
Introduction
Comfort is one of the most important aspects of clothing, as it strongly affects the choice of people when buying the clothes. Moisture transition in textile fabrics is one of the critical factors affecting physiological comfort and is also very important especially for underwear and sportswear. When the metabolism is very high, people sweat and perspiration spreads all over the skin, in that case, clothes should transfer the perspiration outside to make people feel comfortable. To express the moisture transport, wicking is often used. Wicking is a spontaneous transport of a liquid driven into a porous system by capillary forces.1 Wickability describes the ability to maintain capillary flow, on the other hand wettability describes the initial behavior of a fabric or yarn in contact with liquid.2,3 There are several techniques to study wicking properties. The first one consists of weight variation measurement by a Wilhemy balance during capillary wicking.4 The second technique involves setting liquid sensitive sensors regularly along the yarns.5 The last focuses on observing and measuring the capillary flow of a colored liquid and the height is recorded against the time.6 In this paper, the third capillary rise method was employed to determine the wicking properties of the yarns and fabrics under discussion.
The literature review showed that there is a very limited number of reports on comfort properties of textiles from cotton-acrylic blend fibers, despite the fact that the use of such blends is common place in the market. Das et al. studied the effects of yarn fineness, shrinkable acrylic proportion and twist level on various properties of cotton-acrylic blended bulk yarns and found that vertical wicking heights for all the bulked yarns were found to be higher than comparable 100% cotton yarn.7,8...