SKIN COMFORTMETER FOR KNITTED WOOL FABRICS

A full time research fellow has been appointed at Deakin University, for the ongoing research into wool comfort and has three Comfort Meters complete and operational. Also the CRC fabric library and Wool Program database are being populated.

 

The sixth wearer trial, which extended the micron range of fabrics, has been completed and the 7th trial, which is using fabrics made by new supply chain companies, is underway. The latest trial looks at the role of yarn twist in woolen next to skin comfort as it changes the effective length of the protruding fibres, and therefore their rigidity.

 

All supply chain fabrics that arrived last quarter were tested on both the Phabrometer and the Comfort Meter and reports provided back to the supply chains, including meter results and comments. Included among the fabrics were three that included “mercerized” wool from an AWI promoted chlorination process. These fabrics all gave results that would be associated with fabrics made from finer wool, prompting the purchase of this product from European and Chinese sources for inclusion in the 8th wearer trial.

 

A meeting of ultrafine wool growers in Armidale resulted in an extension of the wool handle and comfort projects to see if the instrument outcomes can be used to support a value proposition for ultrafine wool. Four bales of wool, matched for fibre characteristics and differing in style have been identified and purchased for processing in Italy and conversion into lightweight next to skin knitwear.

This Project will develop and commercialise practical fabric measurement technology and related know-how to enable the production and marketing of wool garments meeting critical next to skin performance criteria for consumers in the key emergent wool apparel markets. In so doing, it will provide the wool apparel industry with the mechanism needed to address the strong negative association of the word ‘wool’ with ‘prickle and itch’, and foster development of new markets for wool knitwear where next-to-skin comfort is required.

In collaboration with supply chain partners, this project will develop a commercial instrument for direct measurement of the skin comfort ('prickliness’) of wool knitted fabrics, calibrated against human responses in key target product and regional markets. While the weight of focus in the first year is necessarily on quickly achieving proof of concept for the instrumentation development, the balance of effort in subsequent years will shift toward human response measurement, for calibration of the instrument.