Prediction of physical properties of fabrics using DRIFT spectroscopy and thermal analysis

A comparison of predicted values of the breaking force of cotton fabrics as measured by diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform (DRIFT) spectroscopy and thermogravimetry (TG) was carried out with the aid of the partial least squares (PLS) method. Excellent agreement was found for the validation set of samples with a standard errors of prediction (SEP) value of about 3%. Three thermal degradation parameters of eight different cellulosic samples, predicted from thermogravimetric measurements again using PLS, gave good analytical results on a small validation sample set.