Blog Post # 2 Field Tripppppppppppppp!!!!! My lovely Experience at The Fiber & Biopolymer Research Institute

The Fiber and Biopolymer Research Institute located in Lubbock, Texas is an extraordinary place. It just has too much for just one day. The first day was jammed packed and had so many interesting things that truly will open one’s eyes to see the process that people go through just to turn cotton into yarn.  The second day was definitely the most interesting though.  It had different machines that they used to test the strength of a fabric and how much a fabric pills.  

The most interesting machine was definitely the machine that testes the Breaking Force and Elongation of Textile Fabrics. The machine used cut strip samples and two claws to test the fabrics.  The two claws then pulled part until the fabric broke, taking the measurements and recording them to compare to other results to verify their strength.

Another Machine at The Fiber & Biopolymer Research Institute was the Random Tumble Pilling Tester. This test causes pills (small rolls of fabric that come out of the weave) to form on the fabric by a random rubbing action produced by tumbling specimens in a test chamber.  This process imitates the wear and tear that fabrics go through on a day to day basis. Not all fabrics pill the same. In fact there is a scale of 1 to 5 determining the level of pilling that the fabric displays. If a fabric is rated a 1 it has very severe pilling. If a fabric is rated a 2, it has severe pilling. If it is rated 3, the fabric has moderate pilling. If it rated a 4 on the scale of pilling, it has slight pilling. And last but not least if the fabric has a rating of 5 it has no pills at all.

The third and an extremely important test that the Institute uses to see how much a fabric shrinks or stretches in the washing process. The Institute employees use a small piece of fabric and mark four dots on it. After they mark the dots they use a specialized computer to measure how far apart the dots are. They then wash it is a specialized washing machine and let it dry in a set temperature and humidity. After this process, the fabric is out back under the machine to measure how far apart the dots are then. The difference is compared is shown by the percentage that it shrank.