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A novel fabric thickness and compression tester using magnetic inductance

principle

Article  in  Journal of the Textile Institute · August 2008

DOI: 10.1080/00405000701442585

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Abhijit Majumdar Shib Sankar Saha

Indian Institute of Technology Delhi Kalyani Government Engineering College
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A novel fabric thickness and compression tester using
magnetic inductance principle
Abhijit Majumdar a; Shib Sankar Saha b
a
Department of Textile Engineering, Government College of Engineering and
Textile Technology, Berhampore, West Bengal, India
b
Department of Electrical Engineering, Government College of Engineering and
Textile Technology, Berhampore, West Bengal, India

Online Publication Date: 25 July 2008

To cite this Article: Majumdar, Abhijit and Saha, Shib Sankar (2008) 'A novel fabric
thickness and compression tester using magnetic inductance principle', Journal of
the Textile Institute, 99:4, 359 — 362
To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/00405000701442585
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A novel fabric thickness and compression tester

using magnetic inductance principle
Date Submitted 8 February 2007, Date Accepted 27 April 2007 doi:10.1080/00405000701442585

Abhijit Majumdar1 and Shib Sankar Saha2

1
Department of Textile Engineering, Government College of Engineering and Textile Technology, Berhampore, West
Bengal 742 101, India
2
Department of Electrical Engineering, Government College of Engineering and Textile Technology, Berhampore, West
Bengal 742 101, India

Abstract A novel method has been proposed and an instrument has been developed to measure the
fabric thickness and compression using the magnetic inductance principle. The developed instrument
measures the change in inductance value of a composite magnetic circuit due to the variation of fabric
thickness. The relationship between magnetic inductance and fabric thickness has been interpreted
by a nonlinear regression equation. It has been found that the proposed method can measure the
fabric thickness with a very high degree of accuracy. As the magnetic property of fabrics remains
almost unaffected by moisture regain, the measurement accuracy of the instrument is independent of
atmospheric conditions.

Key words: Compression, fabric thickness, ferrite core, inductance, magnetic circuit.

INTRODUCTION that the fabric thickness measured by KES, FAST and

Fabric thickness is generally evaluated by measuring the
distance between two parallel plates separated by a fab-
ric sample, with a known arbitrary pressure applied and
maintained between the plates (BS Handbook, 1974). Var-
ious gadgets such as Heal’s thickness gauge, Reynolds and
Branson thickness tester and Shirley thickness gauge
(Booth, 1968) are now commercially available to mea-
sure the fabric thickness. The response of fabric thickness
to applied forces normal to its plane is known as fabric
compressional behaviour (Van Wyk, 1946; Bogaty et al.,
1953; Larose, 1953; De Jong, 1986). Fabric thickness and
compression are strongly related to handle, drape, comfort
and thermal insulation properties. Peirce (1930), Seaman
(1953) and Fan et al. (2002) developed simple instruments
to measure the fabric thickness. In recent years, two very
successful systems, KES (Kawabata, 1980) and FAST (De
Boss, 1991), have been developed which can objectively
measure a wide range of fabric properties including thick-
ness and compressional behaviour. Ly et al. (1991) reported
Corresponding author:
Abhijit Majumdar
Department of Textile Technology
Indian Institute of Technology
Delhi 110 016, India
Tel: +91-011-26591405; Fax: +91-011-26581103
Email: abhitextile@rediffmail.com
Shirley thickness gauge are highly correlated.
Electrical capacitance and inductance principles are of-
ten used in textile measurement and instrumentation. Ito
and Muraoka (1993); Ansari and Haghighat (2000) and
Ansari et al. (2003) used capacitance and magnetic induc-
tance methods to measure the wicking behaviour of textile
materials. Raychaudhuri (2003) proposed a fabric thick-
ness tester using parallel plate capacitors. This method is
dependent on the dielectric permittivity of fabric, which
changes with moisture regain. Hence, the results may be er-
roneous under different weather conditions. The magnetic
inductance method proposed by Saha et al. (2005) is more
acceptable as it uses magnetic permeability of fabric, which
has negligible dependence on atmospheric conditions and
moisture regain. In the present work, a fabric thickness and
compression tester has been developed which works on the
principle of magnetic inductance of a composite magnetic
circuit.
THEORY OF MAGNETIC CIRCUIT
A magnetic circuit is the route or path followed by mag-
netic flux. Detailed theory of magnetic circuit is avail-
able in many standard textbooks (Sahay and Pathak, 2006;
Umanand and Bhat, 1996). Figure 1 shows a closed iron
ring having a magnetic path of mean length l and area of
cross section A. If a coil of N turns, carrying a current of

Copyright

C 2008 The Textile Institute 359 TJTI 2008 Vol. 99 No. 4 pp. 359–362
 A. Majumdar and S. Sankar Saha
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Figure 2 Schematic diagram of composite magnetic circuit.

Figure 1 Schematic diagram of homogenous magnetic circuit.

i amperes, is wound on this iron ring then the magnetic

flux that would pass through the magnetic path can be
expressed by Equation (1).
P Figure 3 Schematic diagram of fabric thickness tester.
φ= , (1)
R
where φ is the magnetic flux, P is the magnetomotive force
which drives the magnetic flux through the magnetic cir- Therefore, for a composite magnetic circuit having fixed
cuit and R is the reluctance or the opposition offered to number of turns and cross sectional area, the inductance is
the flow of flux. The expressions of P and R are given in inversely proportional to the length of the air gap.
Equation (2).
l
P = N.i and R = , (2)
µo µr A EXPERIMENTAL
where µo and µr are absolute magnetic permeability of
Equipment setup and testing
the free space and relative magnetic permeability of the
material, respectively. Based on the theory explained earlier, an instrument was
Hence, developed using UI 100 core of Ferrite, which is a com-
posite of ferric oxide (Fe2 O3 ) with oxides of one or more
Ni
φ= l
. (3) bivalent metals such as Manganese (Mn), Zinc (Zn), Nickel
µo µr A (Ni), Magnesium (Mg) etc. This type of core has relative
permeability of 2000 or higher. Two coils, each having 1500
Now, if there is any change of flux (φ) due to change
turns, were wound over the two limbs of the U-section as
of current (i) then according to Faraday’s law of electro-
depicted in Figure 3. Copper wire of 33 SWG was chosen
magnetic induction, a voltage will be induced across the
for the coil, which can carry up to 150 mA current without
winding as shown in Equation (4).
overheating and this amount of current handling capability
dφ 1 di di will be sufficient for the instrument even in case of online
e = −N = −N2 l = −L , (4)
dt µ µ A
dt dt measurement. The fabric sample was placed between the
o r
U and I section. As the magnetic permeability of fabric is
where e is the induced voltage and L is the inductance of much lower than that of Ferrite, the gap created by the
the coil. fabric between U and I section can be considered to be an
Figure 2 shows that if a small air gap is introduced air gap having a length equal to twice the fabric thickness.
in the closed magnetic path then a composite magnetic The developed instrument along with the conventional
circuit is formed and the expression for inductance takes thickness tester has been shown in Figure 4.
the following form: Ninety-five woven fabric samples made from cotton,
N2 polyester, viscose, wool and their binary blends were
L= , (5) placed, one at a time, between the U and I section of the
li
µo µr A
+ la
µo A instrument to vary the inductance, which was measured
where li is the length of iron path and la is the length of air by a standard LCRQ bridge having a resolution of 10 µH
gap. in the selected scale. The I section of the instrument was
Now, for a core with very high relative magnetic per- adequately loaded to exert 50 g/cm2 pressure on the fabric.
meability, the factor µo µli r A can be neglected with respect All the samples were also tested for their thickness using
to µloa A . The approximated expression for inductance is standard bench thickness tester applying the same pres-
sure. For each sample ten readings were taken at different
shown in Equation (6).
places and the average was calculated. Out of 95 samples 86
N2 µo A samples were randomly chosen for developing a nonlinear
L= (6) regression equation relating the fabric thickness and the
la

TJTI 2008 Vol. 99 No. 4 360 Copyright

C 2008 The Textile Institute
 Compression tester using magnetic inductance principle

0.8
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R = 0.987

Predicted thickness (mm)

0.6

0.4

0.2

0
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Actual thickness (mm)

Figure 6 Actual and predicted thickness in test data.

Figure 4 The developed and conventional fabric thickness
testers. 2.00

1.90
0.8

Thickness (mm)
−1.435 1.80
y = 8.511x
0.6 R = 0.985
Thickness (mm)

1.70

0.4
1.60

0.2
1.50
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 120

0.0 Pressure (g/cm2)

5.0 7.5 10.0 12.5 15.0 17.5 20.0 22.5 25.0
Inductance (mH)
Figure 7 The pressure-thickness curve of fabric compression.

Figure 5 Scatter plot of inductance value and fabric thickness.
measured inductance value. The remaining nine samples
were used as test data to validate the developed equation.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Evaluation of the instrument
Figure 5 depicts the scatter plot of the measured inductance
and fabric thickness values. It is observed that a nonlinear
inverse relationship prevails between the two parameters.
The best-fit power equation, which relates the fabric thick-
ness and inductance is given in Equation (7):
Fabric thickness (mm) = 8.511 Inductance−1.435
Compression measurement
To measure the compression characteristics of the fabric,
load on the I section of the instrument was increased from
25 g/cm2 to 105 g/cm2 with an increment of 5 g/cm2 in
each step and the concomitant change in the inductance
was measured. These inductance values were then con-
verted into fabric thickness using Equation (7). Figure 7
demonstrates a typical pressure-thickness curve for a fabric
under compressive loading. As the pressure increases the
fabric thickness first decreases rapidly as the initial com-
pression region has lower modulus. However, the slope of
the curve reduces at higher pressure as the fabric core layer
is incompressible (Hu and Newton, 1997; Matsudaira and
Qin 1995). When the recovery curve of fabric thickness
was plotted, a clear hysteresis was noticed (not shown in
(7) Figure).

Effect of moisture on measurement accuracy

The coefficient of correlation (R) of the above equation
was −0.985, which signifies very strong association be-
tween the fabric thickness and inductance. To validate the
accuracy of the proposed method, the inductance values of
nine test samples, which were not used earlier, were used
as input in Equation (7) and thickness of the fabrics was
predicted. Figure 6 shows the scatter plot of actual and
predicted fabric thickness for the test samples. The coeffi-
cient of correlation between the two thickness values was
0.987.
To investigate the effect of moisture regain of the fabric on
the accuracy of measurement of the developed instrument,
ten randomly chosen samples were tested for their induc-
tance after conditioning them in standard atmosphere for
24 hours. The same samples were again tested for their
inductance after complete oven drying. The inductance
values were then converted to fabric thickness using Equa-
tion (7). It was observed that on average the thickness
change was less than 2%, which may be attributed to fi-
bre swelling (Stuart 1971). This observation ratifies the

Copyright

C 2008 The Textile Institute 361 TJTI 2008 Vol. 99 No. 4
 A. Majumdar and S. Sankar Saha
theory that magnetic permeability of textile fabric is almost
Downloaded By: [Indian Institute of Technology] At: 16:05 29 July 2008
unaffected by the moisture regain.
CONCLUSIONS
It has been demonstrated that the fabric thickness and
compression could be measured by using the inductance
of a composite magnetic circuit. The thickness obtained
from the developed instrument was highly correlated
with the thickness measured by standard tester. As the
instrument exploits variations in the inductance of
the composite circuit, the measurement is insensitive to the
moisture effect, which underlines the superiority of the
method over the capacitance based method. The instru-
ment is cheap and simple in design. As the fabric thickness
has been converted into equivalent magnetic inductance,
it can be directly interfaced with a computer using data ac-
quisition system for online measurement. Further research
is being conducted in this direction.
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