STUDY ON WICKING MEASUREMENT IN THIN LAYER TEXTILES BY PROCESSING DIGITAL IMAGES

The purpose of this work is to assess and develop experimental techniques that allow wicking measurement over a wide range of textiles. Various kinds of fabrics, nonwoven layers and an electro spinning nylon layer were used as the test materials. A syringe is used to drop a 0.02 g spot of distilled water on the sample and a digital camera to take pictures simultaneously. When the wicking process stops, the images are processed and the increase in wicking area is measured using Matlab 7.4 and a set of image processing tools. It is shown that the newly developed technique is able to test the wicking behavior of various kinds of textiles with different thickness.