A categorization tool for fabric systems used in firefighters' clothing based on their thermal protective and thermo-physiological comfort performances:

Fabric systems used in firefighters' thermal protective clothing should offer optimal thermal protective and thermo-physiological comfort performances. However, fabric systems that have very high thermal protective performance have very low thermo-physiological comfort performance. As these performances are inversely related, a categorization tool based on these two performances can help to find the best balance between them. Thus, this study is aimed at developing a tool for categorizing fabric systems used in protective clothing. For this, a set of commercially available fabric systems were evaluated and categorized. The thermal protective and thermo-physiological comfort performances were measured by standard tests and indexed into a normalized scale between 0 (low performance) and 1 (high performance). The indices dataset was first divided into three clusters by using the k-means algorithm. Here, each cluster had a centroid representing a typical Thermal Protective Performance Index (TPPI) value and a...