Predicting Seam Opening Behavior of Woven Seat Fabrics

The slippage-based opening at the seam line occurs on the woven fabrics due to movement in the fabric of the weft yarns over warp yarns (or warp yarns over weft yarns) at a sewn seam during utilization. Recurrent sitting down and standing up or continuously sitting down produces a load at the seam line and causes transverse strain at stitch rows. Owing to this strain, displacement (seam slippage) of the stitch could occur, leading to opening in the fabric at the seam line. This study is focused on constructing a system which is based on a non-linear regression mathematical model to predict the seam opening properties of woven fabric within two different seam opening standard test methods. The first is the fixed load test method; the other is dynamic seam fatigue. The physical properties of the fabric and stitch density play important roles in the seam opening of the seat fabric. The number of weft yarns per unit length, yarn linear density and stitch density were selected as influential factors. The prediction equation is based on completely randomized variance analyses model. The coefficients of the curves fitted were computed by means of non-linear regression analysis. Regression coefficient ( R ² ) values for these curves were observed to be highly reliable at more than 0.9. Also the correlation coefficients ( r) between actual and predicted values were very high at more than 0.96.