Moisture transportation in polyester fabrics by plasma printed wicking channels

Abstract

By dissipating the absorbed moisture on clothes quickly, the wearer's comfortability can be improved. Wicking plays a vital role in transporting sweat away through the fabric from the generation areas of the body. Usually, this transportation is an undirected random process. It transports moisture in all possible directions, making large wet patches on the cloths, and these could lead to the wearer's discomfort. This paper reports a method to transport moisture away through predefined paths to predefined locations on weft knitted polyester fabric. The moisture transportation paths were printed on the fabric using a dielectric barrier discharge plasma gun. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed channel printing process for moisture management on the clothing.