Resilience of crease recovery of woven fabrics in repeated tests

Fabrics are often subject to repeated creasing and bending deformations, such as elbow movements, and the resilience of crease recovery is an important property that affects fabric’s serviceability. In this research, nine types of woven fabrics were examined on an automated crease recovery tester repetitively to investigate the crease recovery behaviors, and possible factors affecting the creasing resilience. Each specimen was pressed and its recovery process was recorded by sequential images, which allowed the recovery angle to be calculated in real-time. This process was repeated 30 times for the same specimen. The parameters, such as initial angular velocity, instant recovery time and angle, stable recovery time and angle, were extracted from the recovery curve of each cycle, and calculate the differences between different cycles to characterize the changes of crease recovery in repeated tests. The experimental results show that the more the circulating test conducts, the earlier the instant and stable recovery time appear. The stable recovery angles decrease rapidly in the first few cycles, fall more slowly when the testing cycle increases, and finally become stable at a cycle near the 25th cycle. Cotton fabrics take fewer cycles to reach steady than wool fabrics. The high elasticity of polyester fibers affects the resilience remarkably.