Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Concept

Evaporation — where it appears

The loss of water from a wet cloth's surfaces into the air, at a rate the room sets rather than the cloth. It runs from a few tens of grams a square metre an hour in still air to hundreds in a breeze, and while the surface stays wet a cloth's drying time is the water it holds over that rate.

Named by 2 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

The wicking front against time, in four rooms. The height of the wicking front in a sheeting-weight strip against time on a logarithmic clock. The fine system, the pores between fibres, rises to a steady height set by the room: 1064 mm at 20 g/m²·h, nine tenths of it after 4.1 h; 501 mm at 100 g/m²·h, nine tenths of it after 53 min; 255 mm at 400 g/m²·h, nine tenths of it after 14 min; 133 mm at 1500 g/m²·h, nine tenths of it after 3.7 min. The coarse system, the holes between yarns, stops at 137 mm after 17 s whatever the room, because gravity stops it rather than drying.

A wick reaches its ceiling in the time its cloth takes to dry

A drying cloth lifts water to a steady height and no further, and the question left was how long it takes to get there. The answer has no permeability and no surface tension in it. Where gravity is small the front climbs as the ceiling times the root of one minus a decaying exponential, and the exponential's time is the cloth's own pore water divided by the rate its faces lose water — the time the room would take to dry it. In an ordinary room that is half an hour, and the front is nine tenths of the way up in fifty-three minutes.

applied · Wicking What every 150 g/m² cotton cloth carries into the drying, against its count. The water a plain cotton cloth of 150 grams a square metre holds when it starts to dry, as a share of its dry weight, for every count that can make that weight as one cloth, from 20 to 200 tex — cloths whose thickness runs from 0.33 to 1.06 mm. Laid flat without a spin, every pore is full and the share climbs with the count from 128% to 591%, because a coarser cloth of one weight has larger, deeper holes. Hung on a line for a metre, the holes drain above their own head and every count keeps 101% to 104%. Spun at 1,400 rpm in a full load, every count keeps 40.9%, the finest and the coarsest within 0.1 of a point of each other. What the chart cannot show is the water a drained channel keeps as films, which lifts the two lower lines alike.

A spun cloth dries by its weight

Every plain cotton of 150 grams a square metre contains the same fibre, and the count only arranges it: the coarsest is three times as thick as the finest. Laid out wet without a spin, the thick one holds four and a half times as much water, all of it in its holes. Spun, every one of them keeps 40.9 per cent of its weight and dries in the same time — because a spin empties the holes, and what it leaves in the yarns is not their volume but the fibres' surface, which the weight has already fixed.

cloth · Water

Named alongside it

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

Areal weightCapillary risePacking factorPermeabilityPore sizeSpecificationSwellingTwo pore systemsWashburnWaterWicking

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