Fiber and Biopolymer research institute

This week, my interior materials class visited Texas Tech's Fiber and Biopolymer research center. On the first day, we were able to go through the fiber making process. It began in a room where there were bales of unprocessed cotton. First, the cotton was put into a number of machines that cleaned it, and took out the debris.

After the cotton was cleaned, it was pulled and spun into long strands, about as thick as rope. Then, through different machines, it was spun thinner and thinner until it was thread. After the cotton was made into thread, we went to a room where they showed us multiple ways of weaving the thread into fabric.

The second day that we visited the research center, we toured the testing rooms. In these rooms, fabrics and yarns and threads are tested to figure out many of their properties. The first machine we were shown was the Martindale Abrasion tester, which determines how much wear and tear the fabric can take. The way it works is a piece of fabric is put on a circular tray that has a rough surface. On top of that that you can add many different weights, in order to place a specific amount of pressure on the fabric. As the machine finishes each step, the fabric is examined to see if any of the threads were broken in the test.

Another machine we got to learn about was the random pilling tester, which tests the amount of time and pressure it takes for a fabric to pill. Pilling is the little fabric balls that form on a piece of fabric form pressure and abrasion. This process is important to decide if it is a good fabric for using on a dialy basis, or being rubbed agianst fairly often. Therefor,  the amount of time it takes for a fabric to pill is very important

We also saw a machine that was the quick wash and drying process. The purpose of this machine is to see how long it takes or how much the fabric shrinks and what happens to it when it is washed and dried. The fabric size is recorded before the process as well as after in order to produce the percentage that it shrunk. The fabric is then scanned and the information about it is saved.