A New Apparatus for the Study of Fabric Drape

A new drape elevator is developed to analyze the drape generation mechanism. The drape elevator can measure drape shape, including node generation at various stages during drape formation. The drape elevator method indicates better reproducibility of the drape coefficient of the fabrics than the conventional method. The drape formation process is experimentally found to consist of three stages, seeds generation, their development, and the final stabilizing stages. A new parameter R, evaluating the shape of the drape, is defined in terms of the drape projection. Both the R parameter and the drape coefficient are expected to be useful parameters for the quantitative analysis of fabric drape formation.