Low-stress mechanical properties of wool-cotton blended fabrics.

Abstract

Hand-spun and hand-woven textiles made of natural fibers are known as khadi fabrics. Khadi fabrics are known for their luxury, excellent handle, and comfort properties. These properties can not be obtained using the methods employed for machine-made textiles. The fabric handle is associated with low-stress mechanical properties. In this work, the low-stress mechanical properties of wool-cotton blended khadi fabrics are studied and the effect of different blend proportions of wool fibers and yarn count on the fabric properties is investigated. The combination of different wool varieties was spun using a hand-operated spinning machine (charkha) and used as weft, while the various cotton-wool blends were employed as warp. A total of 27 types of wool-cotton khadi fabrics were woven on a handloom. The low-stress mechanical properties were measured using the SiroFAST system. It was found that the extensibility, formability, shear rigidity, bending rigidity, relaxation shrinkage, and hygral expansions of fabrics were influenced by the proportions of wool blend/mix and yarn linear density. The shear and bending rigidity of wool-cotton fabric are significantly influenced by the wool content in wool-cotton blended warp yarn as well as the proportion of AM wool in weft yarn (p < .001). From a formability point of view, wool-cotton fabrics perform well during garment manufacturing irrespective of a wool type. Relaxation Shrinkage in wool-cotton fabric is higher in warp wise than weft wise and increases with increasing the amount of wool for each type of fabric. The wool dominant fabric has higher hygral expansion in the weft direction than the warp direction.