Analysis and modeling of drying behavior of knitted textile materials

ABSTRACT

Drying properties of textiles in summer and/or after any kind of physical activity resulted in sweating is of great importance for garments with high clothing comfort. This study analyzes the drying behavior of knitted fabrics produced from various fibers at different ambient air conditions. Drying kinetics and modeling of fabrics dried in standard environmental conditions were investigated in the first part. Polyester and lyocell fabrics were found to be the fastest drying samples. A two-stage modeling that is a combination of linear approach and thin-layer equations was used, and the best fitted equation was found to be the logarithmic one. The two-stage model was also proved to predict the drying rate. The second part included the effects of ambient humidity on drying times and rates. Drying time of polyester and polyester blended fabrics was affected by the increase in the humidity to a great extent. Furthermore, a quadratic function was found to be highly correlated with the computed data, so it was proposed to define the drying behavior by ambient air humidity and drying time.

KEYWORDS:

• Clothing comfort
• drying curve
• drying rate
• mathematical modeling
• textile materials

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Şaban Sevilir, Tuğçe Hüsem, and Suna Özcan for their help in laboratory testing.