Abstract
Polyester fabrics are attributed with various performances and are currently applied widely in textiles. This necessitates a quick and effective selection process to choose polyester fabrics to correspond with engineers' designs for industrial textiles. Therefore, the main focus of this paper is to present the comprehensive handle evaluation system for fabrics and yarns (CHES-FY), which has been specially developed to measure the basic handle of textile materials, including softness, stiffness, smoothness and tightness. Several kinds of polyester fabrics were chosen to undergo subjective evaluation and testing by the CHES-FY system, and were assigned into corresponding clusters by the K-means cluster method. The basic hand indexes of polyester fabric were featured. Comparisons between subjective judgments and the objective K-means cluster method were conducted. Experimental results show that a good correlation exists between subjective judgment and the objective cluster method, indicating that the four basic hand indexes measured by the CHES-FY system can be utilized to characterize the comprehensive hand of industrial polyester fabrics, and that the CHES-FY system can be used to discriminate categories of polyester fabrics.
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