Abrasion Resistance: The ability of fabric to resist wear when repeated rubbing against another surface. Pilling is a by-product of abrasion and pilling resistance depends on the construction and the type of the fiber used.
Air Jet Texturising: Texturising of continuous filament yarns by overfeeding into a high-pressure jet of air, to create a looped and more natural appearance yarn. The filaments become entangled and form a yarn with high bulk and a soft surface. Can be used to combine two or more ends of different filaments or multiple ends of the same filaments to make a single end of yarn.
Air Permeability: The ability of a material to allow air to pass through its structure.
Barré: An imperfection, characterized by a ridge or mark running in the crosswise or lengthwise directions of the fabric. Can be caused by tension variations in the knitting process, poor quality yarns or problems during the finishing process.
Breathability: The ability of a fabric or membrane to permit air vapor passage through its structure thus allowing for example sweat vapors to escape from the inside of the fabric.
Cationic: A type of dye used on modified polyester or modified nylon yarn and also on acrylic. Often used to achieve cross-dyed effects. Cationic dyeable yarn can be used in a pattern with regular yarn in the same fabric. The pattern becomes visible by dyeing the fabric in 2 baths, one for each of the types of yarn. When cationic fiber is fixed with conventional fiber, various multicolors and cross-dye effects can be achieved from a single dye bath.
Decitex: A system of measuring the weight of a continuous filament fiber used to express the yield or thickness, equal to the weight in grams of 10,000 meters of yarn. Higher the decitex, the thicker/heavier the yarn.
Denier: In the United States, this measurement is used. Numerically, a denier is the equivalent to the weight in grams of 9,000 meters of continuous filament fiber. The lower the number, the finer the fiber.
Dpf: The weight of each filament in a yarn. Expressed as denier per filament
Filament: A manufactured fiber of indefinite length (continuous) that make up a yarn, extruded from the spinneret during the fiber production process.
FT: Continuous filament yarn produced with the false twist texturising technique where the yarn is not set but bulky.
FTF: Continuous filament yarn whose texture has been fixed and set during the false twist texturising process.
Intermingled (IMG)/ Interlaced (INT):In order to improve runability of the yarn closed points can be made which hold the filaments together. IMG yarns have high amount of strong intermingling points particularly used for warp in weaving, but also used in weft and knitting. INT yarns have low number of weak intermingled points and are particularly used in knitting and weft in weaving.
Polyester: A manufactured fiber introduced in the early 1950s. Of all the manufactured fibers, polyester is the most used and is second only to cotton in worldwide use. Polyester has high strength (although somewhat lower than nylon), excellent resiliency and high abrasion resistance. Low absorbency allows the fiber to dry quickly.
The characteristics can be summarized as
- Strong
- Crisp, soft hand,
- Stretch and shrinkage resistant
- Washable or dry-cleanable
- Fast drying
- Resilient, wrinkle resistant, excellent crease retention (if heat set)
- Abrasion resistant
- Resistant to most chemicals
Major end uses include essentially every form of clothing (dresses, blouses, jackets, sportswear, suits, shirts, pants, rainwear, lingerie, childrenswear) and Home Fashions (curtains, draperies, fiber fill, upholstery, bedding).
Texturising: Man-made filament yarns, which have been treated by, heat and/or mechanical action to imitate the appearance and properties of natural fiber yarns. With this technique continuous synthetic filaments are changed into more open voluminous structures to extend the use of manufactured fibers.
Trilobal: Yarns produced with a cross section of a triangular shape in order to improve brightness and light reflection of the fabric.