This award is for support of a cooperative project by Professor Mansour Mohamed, Head, Department of Textile Engineering, Chemistry and Science at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina and Professor Mohamed Sultan of the Faculty of Engineering in Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt. The two scientists will study and evaluate the use of fabric hand in the garment industry to assess the appearance, comfort and the manufacturing quality of garments. They plan to use a newly developed single tester to judge the quality of fabric hand in the garment industry, to assess the tester ability to predict the probability of seam pucker occurrence, and determining the limiting values of fabric hand to guarantee the absence of seam pucker, correlating the standard values of fabric hand for each end use, and utilizing this information to refine the single tester.
Scope: This award is for collaboration between two experienced scientists in the US and Egypt, to develop a simple technique for testing garments in a manner that correlate the results with the value of the garment to the end consumer, namely through the sense of hand feel. Since the hand feel is a subjective measure, developing a tester that simulates that fabric hand is both complicated and important. The Egyptian scientist has developed a simple single tester that will be used as the starting point for the proposed work. The US scientist is well qualified to contribute to this research based on his extensive research of several aspects of weaving technology and of applications of various weaves. The results of their collaboration could be a useful technology to relate physical measurements to subjective evaluation by consumers, thus helping the garment industry greatly by producing marketable products. This proposal meets the INT objective of increasing US-foreign collaboration in areas that benefit both sides. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities.
