Palani Rajan T., Prakash C. and Ramakrishnan G.
Polyester multifilament is used to produce the face and back layer of warp knitted spacer fabric (WKSF) and these two layers are connected by polyester monofilament as a middle…
Abstract
Purpose
Polyester multifilament is used to produce the face and back layer of warp knitted spacer fabric (WKSF) and these two layers are connected by polyester monofilament as a middle layer. This fabric has unique and extraordinary characteristics, and different possibilities of fabric structure and the middle layer thickness are tried to find out the moisture management properties. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
This study investigates the influence of fabric thickness and structure on moisture management properties.
Findings
Polyester monofilament quickly up takes the water molecule from the water reservoir and transfers it by capillary action. The gravitational force and the availability space between the two outer surface layers restrict the movement of water molecules, although the pressure develops to push the molecules from the water reservoir. As a result, all the spacer fabric samples attain the equilibrium state very quickly. WKSF and the hexagonal net structure prove to be better in vertical wicking.
Originality/value
The liquid movement is quick in the front side of the spacer fabric, and the rate of wicking is higher in open structure than in the closed structure. It confirms that the hexagonal net structure produces high pore size on fabric and it reaches maximum wicking values. Fabric thickness does not have much influence on the vertical wicking properties of all fabric samples, and the rate of liquid movement produces a similar trend. In in-plane wicking, the polyester monofilament in the middle layer of spacer fabric plays a major role rather than the outer surface layers of fabric.
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Ramakrishnan G., Prakash C. and Janani G.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate plasma treatment for Tencel microfibre fabrics for possible improvement in various functional properties.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate plasma treatment for Tencel microfibre fabrics for possible improvement in various functional properties.
Design/methodology/approach
The plasma treated and untreated fabrics were dyed using reactive dyes and evaluated for comfort properties such as wicking, water vapour permeability and air permeability.
Findings
The various comfort properties of plasma treated and an untreated Tencel microfibre fabric have been studied. The wicking results showed a significant reduction in wicking time for plasma treated fabrics compared to untreated fabrics. The test results for water vapour permeability show no significant difference between plasma treated and untreated fabrics. The plasma treated samples show higher air permeability than untreated samples. In the wetting test, it is clearly seen that the plasma treated samples absorbed the water at a faster rate.
Originality/value
This research investigates plasma treatment for Tencel microfibre fabrics for possible improvement in various functional properties.
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Varadaraju Ramakrishnan and Srinivasan Jagannathan
The purpose of this paper is to optimize the linear densities of polyester yarn and filament for inner layer and elastane for middle layer with cotton yarn outer layer in plain…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to optimize the linear densities of polyester yarn and filament for inner layer and elastane for middle layer with cotton yarn outer layer in plain knitted plated structure for hot and dry environment clothing.
Design/methodology/approach
Three levels of polyester yarn linear densities (11.1, 8.4 and 5.6 Tex), filament linear densities (0.8, 1.55 and 2.3 Decitex) and elastane (0, 4 and 8 percent) with 14.75 Tex cotton yarn have been used to knit 15 single jersey plated fabrics based on Box and Benhens experimental design with same loop length. Three cotton–elastane core-spun fabrics were also produced. All the fabrics were analyzed for moisture and ergonomic comfort properties and wet fabric coefficient of friction.
Findings
The increase in elastane content and yarn linear density decreases water vapor and air permeability; the increase in filament linear density decreases wicking rate and water absorbency. The optimum solution is 5.55 Tex polyester yarn of 0.8 Decitex filament as inner layer and 14.75 Tex cotton yarn as outer layer which gives good heat and moisture transfer without stickiness.
Research limitations/implications
The implication of this paper is to study thinner polyester, polypropylene and polyethylene fabrics with more micro pores as skin contact layer for quicker heat and moisture transfer.
Practical implications
Outward wickability of sweat from the skin is the prime requirement of all skin contact layer fabrics.
Social implications
It shifts the social attitude of most comfortable fabric to polyester–cotton plated for hot and dry climate.
Originality/value
This paper employs a more practical method for the selection of fabric.
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Lena L. Kronemeyer, Raik Draeger and Martin G. Moehrle
Identifying ideas for frugal innovations could substantially support engineers and managers in their work. Patents may be a promising source of ideas for frugal innovations. The…
Abstract
Purpose
Identifying ideas for frugal innovations could substantially support engineers and managers in their work. Patents may be a promising source of ideas for frugal innovations. The purpose of this paper is to show how patents of this kind can be identified.
Design/methodology/approach
Prior work has developed a generic process model to identify frugal patent candidates. They use semantic analysis and a frugal thesaurus for searching and characterizing frugal patent candidates. The question is, whether and how this process model can be applied to a different industry successfully? The field of small household appliances is selected as a testbed because it is known for including frugal innovations while having a different business model than the industrial field in which the thesaurus was developed.
Findings
Applying the process model leads to a number of 22 strongly frugal patent candidates, which are manually evaluated based on three frugal characteristics. Due to this analysis, a high fraction of the candidates could be identified as frugal patents, which validates the process model. In addition, this paper outlines several options for enhancing the process model, e.g. by separating between a frugal search and a frugal evaluation thesaurus.
Originality/value
The process model to identify frugal patent candidates can be used by engineers and technology managers to find ideas for frugal innovations. This paper not only shows its applicability in the industry of small household appliances but gives the basis for its successful transfer to other industries.
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Seungpeel Lee, Honggeun Ji, Jina Kim and Eunil Park
With the rapid increase in internet use, most people tend to purchase books through online stores. Several such stores also provide book recommendations for buyer convenience, and…
Abstract
Purpose
With the rapid increase in internet use, most people tend to purchase books through online stores. Several such stores also provide book recommendations for buyer convenience, and both collaborative and content-based filtering approaches have been widely used for building these recommendation systems. However, both approaches have significant limitations, including cold start and data sparsity. To overcome these limitations, this study aims to investigate whether user satisfaction can be predicted based on easily accessible book descriptions.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors collected a large-scale Kindle Books data set containing book descriptions and ratings, and calculated whether a specific book will receive a high rating. For this purpose, several feature representation methods (bag-of-words, term frequency–inverse document frequency [TF-IDF] and Word2vec) and machine learning classifiers (logistic regression, random forest, naive Bayes and support vector machine) were used.
Findings
The used classifiers show substantial accuracy in predicting reader satisfaction. Among them, the random forest classifier combined with the TF-IDF feature representation method exhibited the highest accuracy at 96.09%.
Originality/value
This study revealed that user satisfaction can be predicted based on book descriptions and shed light on the limitations of existing recommendation systems. Further, both practical and theoretical implications have been discussed.
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Govindan Karthikeyan, Govind Nalankilli, O L Shanmugasundaram and Chidambaram Prakash
– The purpose of this paper is to present the thermal comfort properties of single jersey knitted fabric structures made from bamboo, tencel and bamboo-tencel blended yarns.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present the thermal comfort properties of single jersey knitted fabric structures made from bamboo, tencel and bamboo-tencel blended yarns.
Design/methodology/approach
Bamboo, tencel fibre and blends of the two fibres were spun into yarns of identical linear density (30s Ne). Each of the blended yarns so produced was converted to single jersey knitted fabrics with loose, medium and tight structures.
Findings
An increase in tencel fibre in the fabric had led to a reduction in fabric thickness and GSM. Air permeability and water-vapour permeability also increased with increase in tencel fibre content. The anticipated increase in air permeability and relative water vapour permeability with increase in stitch length was observed. The thermal conductivity of the fabrics was generally found to increase with increase in the proportion of bamboo.
Research limitations/implications
It is clear from the foregoing that, although a considerable amount of work has been done on bamboo blends and their properties, still there are many gaps existing in the literature, in particular, on thermal comfort, moisture management and spreading characteristics. Thus the manuscript addresses these issues and provides valuable information on the comfort characteristics of the blended fabrics for the first time. In the evolution of this manuscript, it became apparent that a considerable amount of work was needed to fill up the gaps existing in the literature and hence this work which deals with an investigation of the blend yarn properties and comfort properties of knitted fabrics was taken up.
Originality/value
This research work is focused on the thermal comfort parameters of knitted fabrics made from 100 per cent tencel yarn, 100 per cent bamboo yarn and tencel/bamboo blended yarns of different blend ratios.
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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a firm’s undertaking of a bond IPO influences the monitoring of the private loans granted to the firm by private lenders. If it…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a firm’s undertaking of a bond IPO influences the monitoring of the private loans granted to the firm by private lenders. If it does, in which direction the monitoring changes?
Design/methodology/approach
The author uses both univariate and multivariate analyses to test the hypothesis. For the purposes of this research, the author’s primary data sources are LPC Dealscan, which provides data on private loans; Mergent FISD, which provides data on public bond issues; and the Compustat Industrial Annual Database, which provides the required financial data for the sample firms. The author’s sample covers non-financial US firms for the period of 1991-2010. The author’s final sample consists of nearly 23,000 private loans granted to about 5,500 non-financial US firms.
Findings
The major finding of this research is that private lenders increase their degree of monitoring of loans that they extend to a firm after it issues a bond IPO. The results of the two-stage bond IPO anticipation model further strengthen the findings. The evidence suggests that as the firm issues public debt for the first time, private lenders get concerned about the potential increase of agency problems and leverage, and consequently, find it valuable to increase the degree of monitoring of loans. Also, the magnitude of change in monitoring is strongly influenced by the degree of information asymmetry, leverage, profitability, and potential to waste free cash flow.
Originality/value
This paper enhances one’s understanding of the contracting dynamics between private lenders and the firm as it issues in the public debt market. The findings can aid firms anticipate the borrowing conditions they will face if they undertake a bond IPO. Further, the cross-sectional analysis on covenant changes from pre- to post-bond IPO period identifies specific firm characteristics that impact the magnitude of change of covenant intensity and comprehensiveness. As a result, uncertainty regarding post-bond IPO outcomes is reduced for borrowing firms.
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Yejun Wu, Xiaxian Wang, Peilin Yu and YongKai Huang
The purpose of this research is to achieve automatic and accurate book purchase forecasts for the university libraries and improve efficiency of manual book purchase.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this research is to achieve automatic and accurate book purchase forecasts for the university libraries and improve efficiency of manual book purchase.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors presented a Book Purchase Forecast model with A Lite BERT(ALBERT-BPF) to achieve their goals. First, the authors process all the book data to unify format of books' features, such as ISBN, title, authors, brief introduction and so on. Second, they exploit the book order data to label all books supplied by booksellers with “purchased” or “non-purchased”. The labelled data will be used for model training. Last, the authors regard the book purchase task as a text classification problem and present a model named ALBERT-BPF, which applies ALBERT to extract text features of books and BPF classification layer to forecast purchased books, to solve the problem.
Findings
The application of deep learning in book purchase task is effective. The data the authors exploited are the historical book purchase data from their university library. The authors’ experiments on the data show that ALBERT-BPF can seek out the books that need to be purchased with an accuracy of over 82%. And the highest accuracy reached is 88.06%. These indicate that the deep learning model is sufficient to assist the traditional manual book purchase way.
Originality/value
This research applies ALBERT, which is based on the latest Natural Language Processing (NLP) architecture Transformer, to library book purchase task.
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Muhammad Babar Ramzan, Abher Rasheed, Zulfiqar Ali, Sheraz Ahmad, Muhammad Salman Naeem and Ali Afzal
In the field of knitwear, dimensional stability is assumed as a critical problem that affects the quality and salability of a product. Although much work has been done in this…
Abstract
Purpose
In the field of knitwear, dimensional stability is assumed as a critical problem that affects the quality and salability of a product. Although much work has been done in this area with a focus on the factors affecting fabric shrinkage, however, there is a lack of work on knitwears with respect to their dimensional stability. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of stitching parameters and wash types on the dimensional properties of knitwear.
Design/methodology/approach
The crew-neck t-shirts were prepared by using pique knitted fabrics. Different sewing and finishing parameters were used that include stitch density, stitch type, stitching thread and wash type. The critical measurements of the selected garment are taken as output variables which are body width, sleeve length, body length and across shoulder. After laundering process, shrinkage percentage was calculated by using before-wash and after-wash measurements.
Findings
This study shows that the stitching parameters affect significantly on knitwear’s shrinkage. Thus, when patterns are being developed for the cutting of fabric, expected shrinkage, known as residual shrinkage, must be considered to avoid unexpected changes in garment shape.
Originality/value
This research will be useful for knitwear manufacturing industry.
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Sadaf Aftab Abbasi, Arzu Marmaralı and Gözde Ertekin
This paper investigates the thermal comfort properties of quilted (jersey cord) fabrics produced with different width of diamond pattern, different filling yarn linear density and…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper investigates the thermal comfort properties of quilted (jersey cord) fabrics produced with different width of diamond pattern, different filling yarn linear density and different types of material.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 12 fabrics were knitted by varying the width of diamond pattern (1 and 3 cm), the filling yarn linear density (300 and 900 denier) and the type of materials (cotton, polyester and their combination). In this regard, air permeability, thermal conductivity, thermal resistance, thermal absorptivity and relative water vapor permeability of these fabrics were measured and evaluated statistically.
Findings
The results showed that fabrics knitted using cotton yarn in both front and back surfaces exhibit higher thermal conductivity, thermal absorptivity and relative water vapor permeability characteristics; whereas samples knitted using polyester yarn in both surfaces have higher air permeability and thermal resistance. As the linear density of filling yarn increases, thickness and thermal resistance of the samples increase and air permeability, thermal conductivity, water vapor permeability characteristics decrease. When the effect of the width of diamond pattern compared, it is seen that an increase in the width of pattern lead to an increase in thickness and thermal resistance and a decrease in thermal conductivity, thermal absorptivity and water vapor permeability values.
Originality/value
Many researches were carried out on the thermal comfort properties of knitted fabrics, however there is a lack of research efforts regarding thermal comfort properties of quilted fabrics.