Single knit P/C fabric from compact yarn

Stitch length is the main factor which decides a majority of weft knitted fabric properties, aver UJ Patil and HS Arvind Rao.
Today fashion designers are much conscious than ever and have up-to-date information about the latest fashion trends. The present day consumer demands fashionable garments, which offer comfort and style, stretch and flexibility, freedom and figure enhancement, as he takes it as the tool of expressing his personality. As far as comfort is concerned, polyester/cotton blends are more popular than pure polyester. All cotton garments may be comfortable but have stability and wrinkle issues.

Also, nowadays the end use of compact yarn is becoming more and more important due to its special characteristics. Therefore, there is need for assessing the quality of knitted fabric produced from the compact yarn. In the earlier studies different blends and fibres were used to study the dimensional properties of the weft knitted fabrics.

This article is the outcome of studies done on different properties of single jersey fabric produced with various input yarn tensions and cam settings by using polyester/cotton compact spun yarn.

Experimental study
In this study effect of yarn input tension and cam setting (loop length) are investigated on single jersey fabric behaviour for grey and finished relaxed fabric. Knitted fabric samples were evaluated for stitch length, course per inch, wales per inch, tightness factor, thickness of fabric, weight of fabric (gsm), air permeability, thermal insulation value, bursting strength, stiffness, abrasion, and pilling.

Material Yarn
The yarn characteristics play an important role in the performance of yarn during knitting and appearance of the finished fabric. Knitting usually requires low twist yarn because high twist yarn will create a lot of problems like snarling tendency and it needs to travel longer path, i.e., from package via different guides, through feeder to the needles.

The single jersey knitted samples were prepared from polyester/cotton compact yarn 30s/1 Ne (19.65 Tex) with blend ratio of 80:20. Table 1 shows the properties of yarn.