OBJECTIVE EVALUATION OF TACTILE SOFT-FEELING OF UNDERWEAR KNITTED-FABRICS

Abstract

Tactile soft-feeling (“SOFTNESS”) is one of the most important factor for the quality of underwear fabrics both for experts in the fabric producing factory and also for consumers, that is, the highest softness is closely related with the higher quality.
Firstly, the experts' group and consumers' group judged subjectively the softness for selected 203 samples by grading the feeling using the number corresponding to the intensity of feeling, form HV=1 (weakest) to HV=10 (strongest). Then these grading numbers were correlated with primary hand values of the fabric to explain what the softness feeling is.
When the mean values in each group are correlated, the good agreement between evaluations in two groups was observed. This implies that these two groups have a common criteria for the softness evaluation. This suggests the importance of evaluating the softness by the objective formula derived based on the mean values of judges because of existing within-group variation in the evaluation.
Secondly, the subjective quality values were correlated directly with mechanical parameters of those fabrics and the equation for obtaining the quality value was derived. It has been proved that the prediction ability of this equation is rather higher than the individual judges' judgment.