Strength loss of glass yarn during weft knitting

摘要

Weft-knitted fabrics from glass yarns present many advantages in technical textile applications. However, due to their stiff and brittle nature; glass fibers can easily be broken during weft knitting process that creates broken fiber ends on the fabric surface, and deteriorates the perfonnance of resultant fabric. In this study, weft-knitted glass fabrics with four different knit architectures, and two different cam settings were produced. Number of yarn ply was also varied as 2- and 3-ply. The effect of all these input parameters on strength loss of glass yarn was examined via measuring virgin and unravelled yarn strengths in loop form. Results showed that knit pattern, cam setting and number of yarn ply did not affect the unravelled loop yarn strength at statistically significant level. On the other hand; unravelled yarns exhibited better loop strength than virgin yarns that was attributed to uniform distribution of fibers over cross sectional area of yarn as a result of knitting process.