Assessment of sensorial comfort of fabrics for protective clothing

Protection and comfort are important issues for protective clothing and an appropriate protection is most of the times detrimental for overall clothing comfort. The tactile or sensorial comfort is related to the mechanical interaction between the garment and the human body. Fabric Hand and Fabric Touch are two crucial elements that express how consumers experience textiles by touching them with the fingers and respectively by wearing them. Both subjective and objective methods are used to assess the fabric hand and touch. Within the ongoing CORNET project Touche both subjective methods (e.g. blind tests, questionnaires) and innovative instruments (e.g. FTT, TSA) are employed for assessment of fabric hand and touch. The Fabric Touch Tester (FTT) enables fast and simultaneous assessment of 13 physical fabric indices (e.g. bending, compression, friction, roughness and thermal conductivity) and uses these indices to predict comfort primary indexes such as smoothness, softness, warmness, total hand and total touch. It could be therefore a promising, very fast selection method of fabrics that will eventually lead to clothing with high sensorial comfort. Fabrics with similar weight and thickness were tested aiming at identifying possible significant differences between the samples.