Exploring the relationship between bending property and crease recovery of woven fabrics

Fabric bending property dictates fabric crease behaviors. Exploring the relationship between fabric bending and crease recovery properties is important for better understanding of fabric performance. This paper presents the viscoelasticity modeling of a creased fabric to characterize the torque and bending deformation by crease recovery and bending parameters, respectively. In the experiment, nine types of fabrics were selected to analyze the relation between bending property and crease recovery property. The bending rigidity (B) and the bending hysteresis moment (2HB) were measured by the KES-FB2 Pure Bending Tester. The initial angular velocity (IV) was measured by a dynamic crease recovery tester. The experimental results showed that B and 2HB generally decrease at the beginning and then almost remain unchanged with the increase in IV. We used an exponential function to express the non-linear relation between bending rigidity and the initial angular velocity, and proved that the initial angular velocity is related to fabric bending property and can be used to characterize the fabric crease recovery property.