Wear testing is of interest in a number of technical fields, including civil and mechanical engineering, reliability engineering, metallurgy, and geology. These tests are of importance in ensuring the durability of a material in a particular product or application, and in ensuring that material that erodes because of abrasion does not cause environmental or safety hazards in the production or test environments or in use of the product.
The mechanical properties and dimensions of the fibres are important for abrasion. Fibre type, fibre fineness and fibre length are the main parameters that affect abrasion.Fibres with high elongation, elastic recovery and work of rupture have a good ability to withstand repeated distortion; hence a good degree of abrasion resistance is achieved.
Nylon is generally considered to have the best abrasion resistance, followed by polyester,polypropylene (Hu, 2008). Blending either nylon or polyester with wool and cotton is found to increase abrasion resistance at the expense of other properties (Saville, 1999). Higher wool rate increase the mass loss (Manich et al., 2001).
Acrylic and modacrylic have a lower resistance than these fibres while wool, cotton and high modulus viscose have a moderate abrasion resistance. Viscose and acetates are found to have the lowest degree of resistance to abrasion. However, synthetic fibres are produced in many different versions so that the abrasion resistance of particular variant may not conform to the general ranking of fibres.
The removal of the fibres from yarn structure is one of the reasons of the abrasion. Therefore factors that affect the cohesion of yarns will influence the abrasion resistance of fabrics as well. Longer fibres incorporated into a fabric confer better abrasion resistance than short fibres because it is harder to liberate them from the fabric structure. For the same reason filament yarns are more abrasion resistant than staple yarns made from the same fibre .
The using of finer fibres in the production of yarns causes increment in the number of the fibre in cross section with higher cohesion which results better abrasion resistance. So abrasion retention is better for fabrics with finer fibres .
