Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Depth

Series — page 5

A field says what an essay is about. A series follows one idea essay by essay — from the question that introduces it to the one that assumes all the others.
How much fibre a woven reinforcement holds. A unit cell of a woven reinforcement in section: flat tows, the thickness they add up to, and the wave the warp makes to cross them. The bar below is the fibre volume fraction against the same tows laid flat in two plies and against the packing factor of a tow, which is the most any cloth of them could be. The vertical scale is exaggerated so the interlacing is legible; the horizontal scale is the cloth's own.

Preform

  1. 1 The crimp is the price of being cloth
  2. 2 A fabric to fill and a fabric to load
2 essays · applied Thirty micrometres is a buckling load. The wool fibre diameter at which a protruding end reaches the measured threshold for prickle, against how far it protrudes. A fibre end pressed against skin is a column held at the cloth and free to slide at its tip, so it buckles at 20.19EI/ℓ² and carries no more load than that; below the threshold it bends away and is felt as touch, above it the load stands and is felt as pain. At a two-millimetre protrusion — which the hair model behind these figures puts in the top fifth of a wool's population — the threshold diameter is 32 µm, bracketed at 29–34 by the range of the measured force. Neither the thirty micrometres nor the two millimetres was put in. The band is the force bracket, and the fourth power in I = πd⁴/64 is what makes the boundary sharp: at a mean of 21 µm and a spread of 24%, 3.2% of the fibres are over it, and it is that few per cent that decides whether a garment can be worn.

Prickle

  1. 1 Prickle is a buckling load
  2. 2 A fibre end prickles only inside a window
2 essays · applied What a tensioned sheeting has left of its load. A sheeting pulled to a strain, clamped at that length and left. Its length does not change, and its load does: crossings rearrange locally until the load has fallen to what friction alone can hold, which is 0.0756 N per end and is the same number whatever the cloth was pulled to. So the fraction retained is that floor over the load applied, and it falls — a cloth tensioned to 4.94 per cent keeps 29 per cent of what it was given. Below the resting band's own edge nothing is lost at all, because the cloth was never outside what friction could hold. What the plot cannot show is time: nothing here says how long the rearrangement takes, only where it stops.

Set

  1. 1 A tensioned cloth loses its load
1 essay · mechanics

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