초록
Surface properties, including the texture and the luster, of cotton fibers and yarns thereof play an important role in textile technology. The convolutions and the cross-sectional shape of the cotton fiber affect the fabric texture and the luster accordingly. Mercerization of the cotton fabric affects the luster, strength, and other properties of the fabric. In this study, the effect of mercerization was examined on the luster of the cotton fabric, together with the effect of polishing treatment. One of the traditional methods determining the fabric luster is the use of glossmeter or goniometric glossmeter. The use of glossmeter gives successful results in determining the gloss of rather flat and continuous surface such as plastic sheet, painted surface, or paper products. Since the textile fabrics have diverse surface structures and textures, these could be regarded as having three-dimensional surface. Such complexity imposes some difficulties for differentiating subtle surface luster properties of diverse textile fabrics. The advancement in the area of imaging technologies has enabled the micro-scale analysis of the surface textures and the fabric luster recently. Using a CCD camera, the surface luster images were taken at various incident illumination conditions. Microscale analysis, including the blob analysis, of the images could differentiate the subtle luster properties present in a group of cotton fabric samples comprising mercerized cotton fabric, non-mercerized cotton fabric, polished cotton fabric, and a 'standard' cotton fabric. The glossmeter measurement gave satisfactory but limited differentiation among the samples, whose luster differences are easily recognizable with visual observation, except for the mercerized cotton fabric sample and the non-mercerized cotton fabric. The microscale analysis of the fabric luster could, therefore, help understand the nature of diverse textile fabric luster.