Instrumental evaluation of fabric abrasive wear using 3D surface images

Abstract

Fabric abrasive wear consists of both fuzzing and pilling phenomena, which are often assessed subjectively by comparing the sample to the photographic standards. This paper introduces a stereovision system to generate the three-dimensional (3D) image of surface appearance for objective evaluation of fabric wear. The 3D information of a fabric surface obtained from the stereovision system can be used to extract the fuzzing and pilling parameters that are insusceptible to fabric structures, colors, and fiber contents. Ten types of fabrics were treated on a standard fabric abrasion testing machine (the Martindale Tester) and visually graded. From the 3D images of these fabrics, the fabric fuzziness was quantified using a set of surface roughness parameters, such as the root mean square roughness (R_q), the mean roughness depth (R_z), bearing ratio (t_p), and skewness (R_sk), and the fabric pilling was measured by density (D), height (H), size (S), and area ratio (AR) of individual pills. The results from the 10 tested samples demonstrated that the 3D measurements can characterize fuzzing and pilling appearance of fabric and quantify the degree of fabric abrasive wear.

Keywords:

• Abrasive wear
• pilling
• fuzzing
• surface measurement
• 3D image