Structural Compactness of Woven Wool Fabrics and Their Behavior in Modern Washing Machines

Abstract

A wide array of commercial all-wool fabrics have been subjected to physical analysis and to ten consecutive mild launderings in a modern automatic home washing machine. Many of the fabrics are shown to exhibit low levels of shrinkage in this test. The shrink age of the fabrics of the same weave type is shown to be related to the cover factor of the cloth. A measure of compactness of fabric structure can be computed from the ratio of observed cover factor to the theoretically maximum weavable cover factor. This compact ness ratio shows a good functional relationship to shrinkage in laundering for virtually all of the fabrics. irrespective of weave. This relationship indicates that a commercially acceptable fabric may be designed with respect to its compactness to give low levels of feltability in many repeated launderings.