Textiles Calculations

Integrated Design: MATS10250

Lecturer: Dr Bill Sampson

Office: C51b, Sackville Street Building
Email: w.sampson@manchester.ac.uk

These lecture notes are designed to accompany the slides used in lectures, which
you can download from BlackBoard.

Background
Everyone studying this course is concerned with some aspect of textiles. Whether
our primary interest is in design, fashion, marketing, textiles technology,
management or retailing at some stage we need to make use of numbers to
characterise textile materials. We may need to know, for example
• how much fabric is needed to manufacture a garment?
• how much yarn is required to weave a fabric?
• how close together should yarns be woven to make are fabric of a given
weight?
• how much will it cost to manufacture a fabric or garment?

We will deal with these questions, and some others, as we go through the course.
These examples illustrate the learning outcomes for this part of the course. A full
statement of the intended learning outcomes can be found on BlackBoard, but we
summarise what you should be able to do at the end of the course in the following
statement:

At the end of these lectures you should be able to use simple

calculations to obtain numbers that characterise the structural
properties of textile materials. You should also understand
what these numbers mean, how they relate to each other and
their implications for the cost of textiles materials.
Some terminology
In this part of the course, we will consider the smallest unit of our textile to be a
fibre. With Professor Wortmann, you will look at the structure of these fibres, but
we will consider them just to be rods or cylinders that are much longer than they are
wide. The length of a fibre divided by its width (or diameter) is called its aspect
ratio. Often, physicists consider a fibre to be an object with aspect ratio 20 or more;
textile fibres typically have much greater aspect ratios.
There are many types of fibres, though all can be classified as being either
• natural fibres, or
• synthetic fibres
Examples of natural fibres are cotton, flax, wool and silk. Examples of synthetic fibres
are polyester, nylon, acrylic, etc. As a rule, natural fibres tend to be short and
synthetic fibres tend to be extremely long. We use the following terminology:
• Short fibres are called staple
• Very long fibres are called continuous filament
or just filament
Of course, there are exceptions: silk is a natural fibre and a continuous filament; also
we can make a staple from a synthetic fibre by cutting continuous filament into short
lengths. Short staple fibres may only be a centimetre or two long, though wool and
synthetic staples can be more than 30 cm long.

Some textiles, particularly industrial textiles, are woven out of single filaments called
monofilaments. More commonly filaments and staple fibres are converted to yarn
before weaving or knitting, this involves combining fibres to make a thicker rod-like
structure. There are two main types of yarn:
• Spun staple yarn
• Continuous filament yarn.
Spun yarn is made by twisting staple yarns together; some continuous filament yarns
are not twisted, but many are. There are two types of twist:
• S-twist
• Z-twist
If a yarn is made by spinning together previously spun yarns, then the spinning
alternates between Z- and S-twist. The final twisting direction is used to characterise
the yarn. This can be easily observed by taking apart garden string. As well as the
type of twist (Z- or S-) the amount of twist can be varied. This is often characterised
by the terms
• High twist, or hard twist and
• Low twist, or soft twist
Spinning is often used to blending fibres of different types. Spinning yields a
continuous yarn, but its cross-section is now more complex than that of a single rod,
so its diameter is unlikely to be well-defined.
In this course we will consider two ways of making textiles from yarns:
• weaving, and
• knitting
In weaving, yarns are interlaced with each other to form a fabric, whereas in knitting,
yarns are stitched together in loops. For completeness, we mention a third class of
textile called nonwovens; we will not consider these further in this course, but note
that they have a random-like structure of fibres, which are either chemically or
thermally bonded to each other or entangled so that the fabric holds together.
We consider first the terminology of weaving and woven fabrics. Generally weaving
involves interlacing two sets of parallel yarns that are perpendicular (at right angles)
to each other:
• Lengthwise yarns are called warp yarns;
• Crosswise yarns are called weft yarns.
Warp yarns lie in the warp direction of the fabric, and weft yarns lie in the weft
direction. With each pass of the shuttle through the warp yarns, the weft yarns turn
through 180° so there or no free ends to the yarn at the warp direction edges of the
fabric. These are called the selvedges; fabrics won’t fray at the selvedge.
We have mentioned that knitted fabrics consist of stitches. These stitches are loops
of yarn that pass through other loops of yarn. Just as we have names for the two
directions in woven fabrics, we have names for the two directions in knitted fabrics:
• Wales are the vertical columns of stitches
• Courses are the horizontal rows of stitches

In the next lecture, we will start to use the terminology we have introduced to
identify useful numbers that characterise fibres, yarns and fabrics. Before that lecture,
you should read these notes with a copy of the overheads to hand. It is a good idea
also to look up the terms we have introduced and that are highlighted in bold and
underlined text on the internet. Wikipedia is always not the most authoritative
source of information, but has quite good entries for most of these terms.