Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Concept

Calendering — where it appears

Pressing cloth between heated rollers, which flattens the yarn's section and moves its cover, thickness and lustre without touching the weave. What it changes is the yarn's section rather than the weave, so it moves the cover and the thickness while leaving every count in the draft untouched.

Named by 11 essays across 4 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

A beat at 19.1 mm from grids at 0.5 mm. Two grids at 0.5 and 0.5 mm pitch, the second turned by 1.5°, over a 30 mm window. The dashed rules are one predicted beat period apart. The pattern between them is 38 times the pitch of either grid and neither grid has anything at that scale.

Watered silk is a beat

Fold a ribbed cloth on itself and press it, and a figure appears at a scale neither ply has — fifty times the rib pitch, wandering across the piece. It is the difference of two wavevectors, it is enormous because the angle is tiny, and no two pieces match because no two are folded at the same angle.

pattern · Moire A membrane is cut smaller than it is. Warp and fill compensation against how far the crossings flatten under prestress. With the thread lengths and the cloth's thickness both fixed there is no strain available at all — the closure condition determines the state — so the whole of the compensation is the crossings squeezing and the crimp coming out. The direction that arrives with less crimp gives back less, which is why a warp compensates less than a fill.

A membrane is cut smaller than it is

A tensioned fabric roof is cut to a pattern smaller than the shape it will take, because stressing it makes it grow. At a fixed cloth thickness a prestress can only interchange crimp — one direction grows and the other shrinks — so everything that makes both directions grow is the crossings flattening, which is the one quantity here this site cannot compute.

applied · Crimp The same yarn, flattened. One yarn's cross-section at five degrees of flattening, all drawn at one scale and all of the same area. Nothing is added: the yarn is wider because it is thinner. The cover rises for that reason alone, which is why a calendered cloth is more opaque than the cloth that went into the machine.

Calendering is the cloth arriving at the other model

This site has carried two thread sections side by side since its foundation — Peirce's circle and Kemp's racetrack — and has been careful to say which produced any number. They are not two opinions about one yarn. They are one yarn on either side of a finishing machine.

finishing · Lustre finish From a calender's line load to a force at one crossing. A sheeting through a nip loaded at 30 N per millimetre of bowl width, with the cloth in contact over 5.0 mm. The pressure is the first divided by the second, 6.00 N/mm², and the force at one crossing is that pressure times the area a crossing owns — the product of the two thread spacings, 0.1374 mm². So the crossing carries 0.824 N, the sections flatten to 2.42 and 2.63, and the cloth thins from 0.388 mm to 0.218 mm. What the drawing cannot show is that two cloths through the same nip are not given the same treatment: the area a crossing owns varies fivefold across the standard cloth table, and it is a factor in the force.

A calender spends the compression for good

Calendering was described here as moving a cloth from one thread-section model to another, which was right and had no number in it because the amount of the move was a free parameter. It is a pressure now — and the same nip setting turns out to give two cloths quite different treatments, because the force at a crossing is the pressure times the area a crossing owns.

finishing · Lustre finish An operation multiplies a spread by its own log-slope. A transformation does not leave a population's spread alone: if y goes as the kth power of x then a small spread in x becomes k times that spread in y, exactly in the limit and nearly so at the CVs a yarn has. So an operation with an exponent below one narrows the population it acts on — a thickness that goes as the square root of a load comes out at half the spread it went in with — and one with an exponent of four widens it fourfold. This is the same derivative that decided every bias in this ladder, read for its magnitude rather than for its curvature, and it is why a finish can be a variance-reducing operation without anyone having chosen it for that. The straight line through the origin is the whole of the rule; the departure from it at the right-hand end is the second-order term arriving, which is where the linearisation stops being one.

A finish spends a spread before it spends a mean

Every operation on a cloth multiplies the variation it inherits by its own log-slope, so an operation with an exponent below one makes the cloth more even and one above it makes the cloth less even. Calendering, which is bought for evenness, has an exponent of 1.4.

finishing · Lustre finish A seam stands 763 µm proud of a cloth 382 µm thick. A 10 mm seam allowance of 3 plies in a 60 mm panel of one, in sheeting. The seam stands 763 µm above the body of the garment — which is 102 times the depth at which the body cloth first comes into contact with anything at all. So a flat surface rubbed across this garment touches only the seam, over 16.7% of the area drawn, until it has crushed a whole thickness of fabric. Everything this collection computes about where wear lands on a woven surface applies inside that 16.7%, and the other 83.3% is not being touched.

A seam stands proud and wears first

A seam allowance is three plies where the garment is one, so it stands three quarters of a millimetre above a cloth whose own surface has a few micrometres of contact in it. Anything flat rubbed across the garment touches the seam and nothing else — all of the wear on two or three per cent of the area, until a whole thickness of fabric has been crushed.

applied · Seams A calender multiplies the highlight by 32, and all of it is width. A 2/2 twill in sheeting pressed at increasing force, with the specular area recomputed at each state from the standard compression model. It rises from 0.91% of the plan to 28.9%, a factor of 32, while the cloth thins from 381.6 µm to 186.1 µm. The gain is not in the length of the crowns: that moves by 5 per cent. It is in their width, which moves by 31.8 times, because pressing puts a flat top on the section and a flat top has one normal rather than a fan of them. The finish does not polish the thread. It changes the dimension of the highlight, from a line to a band, and the arithmetic says so by refusing to put any of the gain in the other factor.

A calender buys the width

Press a cloth and its lustre multiplies by twenty-four. None of that comes from the length of its crowns, which moves by six per cent; all of it comes from their width, because a flattened section has a plane on top of it and a plane has one normal rather than a fan of them. The arithmetic refuses to put any of the gain in the other factor.

weaves · Shine Where a calender works, and where recovery has been measured. Each fibre's measured elastic-recovery span drawn against the shape strains a calender imposes, on one axis. The settings run from 11.2 per cent shape strain at a flattening of 1.25 to 54.9 per cent at 3. cotton is measured to 5 per cent; wool is measured to 20 per cent; silk is measured to 5 per cent; flax is measured to 2 per cent; viscose is measured to 5 per cent; nylon is measured to 8 per cent; polyester is measured to 8 per cent. Only wool reaches any setting at all, and only the lightest.

A calender works where nothing has been measured

This account has twice recorded that the missing piece is plasticity — what fraction of a flattening survives the nip. The piece is missing for a sharper reason than nobody having written it down. A calender's flattening is a shape strain, and at the lightest setting in this account's own series that is 11 per cent while cotton's elastic recovery is measured from 2 to 5. Six fibres of seven have no data at any setting the machine has, and wool reaches only the lightest. The law cannot be had from the measurements; what can be had is the bracket, and it is a factor of twenty-four.

finishing · Lustre finish How much plateau a cloth of stated cover can be given. The flat run a calender can put on a 200 micrometre yarn, against the cover the cloth already has. A thread may widen until it meets its neighbours, so the flattening is capped where the section's width equals the pitch; at a cover of 0.3 that is a flattening of 13.9 and 619 micrometres of plateau, and at 0.9 it is 1.32 and 53 micrometres. At full cover both are nothing.

A covered cloth cannot be calendered

A calender widens a section at conserved area, and a thread may widen until it meets its neighbours. So the flattening is capped by the cover the cloth already has — ×30 on a scrim, ×1.32 at a cover of nine tenths, and exactly one at full cover. The plateau a calender buys falls to nothing along with it, which makes the lustre a nip can add and the cloth's opacity the same constraint read twice: a cloth that cannot be seen through is a cloth a calender cannot help.

finishing · Lustre finish The cloth a calender nip exactly fills. The share of a cloth's plan a calender leaves specular, per unit of crown line per crossing, against the cover of the lustrous system, for nips that flatten the yarn by ×1.25, ×1.5, ×2, ×3. Each curve rises while the nip binds and falls once the threads meet their neighbours; the peak is at the cover the nip exactly fills, 0.919 for ×1.25, with a share of 0.200; 0.853 for ×1.5, with a share of 0.333; 0.754 for ×2, with a share of 0.500; 0.628 for ×3, with a share of 0.667. The yarn diameter, 0.2 mm here, appears in neither the peak's position nor its height.

A calender's best cloth is the one its nip fills

A calender's lustre is a length of crown line times a width of plateau. A closer cloth has more crown line and less room to widen each thread into, and the product was expected to peak at some interior cover that would move with the weave. It does not peak at all on the cap alone — per unit of crown line it falls all the way from the most open cloth. The peak is made by the nip: a nip that flattens by f has one best cloth, the one it exactly fills, at a cover of d over the flattened width, and there the lustre is (f − 1)/f. No yarn, and no weave, moves it.

finishing · Lustre finish A satin's contrast as the lamp moves off the mirror. The specular area of an eight-end satin over a plain weave, both as a sheeting, for a source 2° wide moved away from the direction the viewer sees mirrored in the cloth. Moved across the satin's floats, the contrast is 22.4 on the mirror and 21.7 forty degrees off. Moved along them it is 22.4 on the mirror and 0.25 once the source is more than twice its own width away: the satin is darker than plain. A calendered satin falls to 1.83 across its floats as well. What the plot cannot show is shadowing, which a lamp far enough off the mirror brings in.

A lamp off the mirror lights a satin only across its floats

Every source in the account of a room was a source the viewer sees mirrored in the cloth. A lamp off to one side lights the cloth too, and which facets it reaches depends on which way it is off. Displaced across a satin's floats it is caught by the float's own curve and adds contrast like any lamp on the mirror; displaced along them by more than twice its own width it reaches only the turns, and the satin comes out a quarter as bright as plain weave.

weaves · Shine

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

LustreRacetrackCloth thicknessCompression energyCrown lineSpecificationSpecular areaCoverCover factorFloatJammingPeirce's geometry

All concepts