Implementation of an automated system to measure the breathability of different fabrics

Abstract

In this paper the design of an automated measuring system to study and characterize different fabrics in terms of breathability is presented. This system came as a solution to the actual problem in the fabric industry regarding the measurement of breathability. Currently the systems used are not automated, expensive and slow, and the few automated systems used do not often recreate the real sweating conditions. That leads to breathability results that do not match the real performance of the fabrics. This paper presents a system that simulates better the human perspiration. A low-cost system based in Arduino was built and Matlab models were extracted and used to finely tune the PIDs that control the parameters. The software was designed to provide an user friendly operation and to calculate the breathability expressed in commonly used units. This system was proved to be an 80% faster than the current systems in the market, providing a good instrument to perform further studies of different kind of fabrics.