PhabrOmeter® Instrument

The PhabrOmeter® instrument is a piece of testing equipment to simulate a process when fingertip across a fabric surface and squeeze a crumpled piece of fabric in hand so as to measure the stresses and judge the fabric.

• Load range of strain gauge: 0 – 15 Kg; Sampling rate 10/s, resolution 12 bits;
• RS-232C serial port or USB port; 4 digits LED display and touch switch;
• 110V 60 Hz ~ 220V 50 Hz ±10%, AC; Optical-electronic precision position control;
• Instrument size: 9.5 in D x 14.25 in W x 20.5 in H; Net weight: 18 Kg

PhES™ Software

The PhES companion software is a 32 bit graphical user software package for acquiring, analyzing, interpreting and displaying data from the PhabrOmeter®. PhES™ controls every aspect of PhabrOmeter® instrument, and outputs the following numerical results:

• An overall relative fabric hand value + 8 fabric hand attributes
• A drape coefficient value + A wrinkle recovery rate
• A fabric extraction curve + curve's physical property data
• Testing repeatability + Coefficient variation (CV)%

Methematics Theroy Used

The PhabrOmeter adopted the powerful Karhunen–Loeve (K–L) orthonormal expansion theorem of the statistical pattern recognition technique to reduce the original data dimension X to fewer but condensed data points (or features, as they are usually called) Y. The feature set Y is much smaller in dimension than the original set X, and is orthogonal, i.e. all the components of Y are independent of each other and they each contribute different yet complementary information toward defining fabric hand. The relative importance of each component is also determined and the physical meanings of the first three most important components are ascertained, through certain calibration techniques, for describing the different attributes of fabric hand such as Resilience, Softness and Smoothness.