In textile industry, performance of the fabrics is still out of the engineering design, because of the difficulty in designing the proper mechanical properties of fabrics, and also of the difficulty in evaluating the performance where the evaluation has been done by a sensory method named "hand-feel" by experts.
In this article, recent developments in the theoretical research on the mechanical properties of fabrics are introduced. Theoretical methods of calculating the non-linear property in biaxial and uniaxial tensile deformations of plain woven, plain knitted and inter-lock fabrics are presented here. And bending and shear properties of plain woven fabrics are also dealt with.
Furthermore, a new method for evaluating "hand-feel" is introduced; the mechanical properties of fabrics are first characterized and represented by sixteen number of characteristic values obtained by the measurements of mechanical, physical and geometrical properties of the fabrics, and then using a linear model, the "hand-feel" value is calculated from these characteristic values. The agreement between the conventional sensory and the new instrumental methods is demonstrated.
