Measurement of the water vapour permeability of textiles for quality control and product development

 

Modern fashion trends, twined with the desire for increasingly high performance textiles, may have proved a boon to the clothing and outdoor industries – but have placed a considerable strain on fabric producers who need to introduce new performance fabrics in shorter and shorter timescales.

Sadly, conventional testing can take several weeks to make a single permeability measurement and this adds a huge time lag into any development.  Fortunately, Versaperm has come up with a solution that cuts these weeks down to as little as thirty minutes for many fabrics.  Their latest multi-gas permeability meter is often not only over a hundred times quicker but it can be more accurate and can even test several fabrics at a time.

This slashes the development time needed for a new fabric or production method.  Results are typically accurate in the parts per million range (parts per billion in some cases).

The Versaperm system is ideal for both product development and the quality control of fabrics and garments.  It is particularly suited to textiles that need to allow the passage of water vapour (breathable), but strongly resist both water droplets and wind.

Weatherproof textiles are typically plain weaves with yarns coated with a durable water repellent (DWR) finish.  Many also have a microporous or monolithic film, coating, or a bicomponent combination.  Measuring the permeability of such fabrics has historically been fraught with difficulties, with different equipment producing wildly different results – often by as much as 4-500%.

For companies where the throughput is not high enough to warrant dedicated equipment, we provide a laboratory testing service.