Comparative study on evaluating index for visual shielding property of textiles

In order to analyze the applicability and feasibility of optical properties indices to characterize visual shielding property of textiles,comparison is made among the commonly used optical property indices including whiteness, average transmittance under visible light, brightness, transparency,opaqueness and so on. The result shows that whiteness can be used to indicate the visual shielding property when fabrics are light color or white,while brightness can be used to show this property of fabrics with different colors under the conditions that the fabrics are made from the same fiber. The correlation between the opaqueness and transmittance is well at the wavelength of 550 nm,the same result comes out while the average transmittance is under visible light. Under the conditions that there is no standard to express the visual shielding property for fabrics with different fibers and colors,the two kinds of transmittances are suggested to be adopted to characterize the visual shielding property of textiles.