Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Concept

Pre-shrinking — where it appears

Taking a cloth mechanically to where washing would have taken it, so that it arrives at a customer with less left to give. The arithmetic is lengths as fractions of the state each is measured in, and what is left over is the residual shrinkage.

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

Shrinkage from wetting, cloth by cloth. The change in each cloth's relaxed construction when its threads swell by 20% across and 1.2% along. Both states are least-energy states of their own constant-thread-length locus, which is the only comparison the locus admits: its minimum is a state at its own sett, so it may be compared with another minimum and not with a quoted construction. Positive is smaller. Every cloth that has a wet state closes up except the cheesecloth, which opens by half a per cent because the fibre's extra hundredth of length outruns the extra crimp a thicker partner costs. What the bars cannot show is the three cloths that are missing, which have no wet state at all.

Two shrinkages, one tape measure

A cloth that comes out of a wash smaller has done two different things and the tape cannot tell them apart. One is geometric, recoverable and finished in minutes; the other is frictional, permanent and needs agitation. This collection can now compute both, and they have different signatures.

finishing · Shrinkage Wash-by-wash shrinkage, reported and modelled. The shrinkage an unfinished cotton cloth shows in each of five laundering cycles, beside what a model with no rate in it predicts. The model says a wash lets every crossing whose frictional barrier is below the cloth's current excess slip to the edge of its own band, and that is a distribution rather than a rate. Two numbers are fitted — the excess the cloth came off the loom with, 7.13%, and the spread of the barriers, 37.2× — against the first two washes. Washes three, four and five are predictions with nothing left to adjust and come out at 0.506%, 0.284%, 0.179% against reported 0.50%, 0.30%, 0.20%. What the bars cannot show is the finding underneath: the reported yarn-on-yarn friction range gives a spread of only 1.34×, which would have the tail over by the third wash.

A cloth shrinks most the first time

A laundering test reports five numbers and they fall away like a geometric series. Nothing in a wash is slow — a cloth is agitated tens of thousands of times in half an hour — so a second wash that shrinks it again is direct evidence that its frictional barriers are spread, and the ratio between successive washes measures how far.

finishing · Shrinkage

Named alongside it

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

AgitationRelaxationCrimpCrimp interchangeFrictionFrictional floorLocusMoisturePermanent setRelaxation bandResidual shrinkageShrinkage

All concepts