FAVILEIT

Development of a test stand for the simultaneous characterization of fibers and yarns, regarding their electrical and mechanical properties

The rapid development in the field of smart textiles enables a new dimension of functional integration and thus creates the conditions for an innovative design of the future. For the selection and development of suitable fiber materials, the electrical and mechanical properties of the fibers must be known. However, there are currently no standardized and commercially available testing machines for the combined determination of these properties.
In cooperation with the company Textechno, such a testing device was developed, built and tested on various sample materials within the two-year project FAVILEIT. A specially developed contact of the test specimen now enables the electrical resistance to be determined simultaneously and continuously during the tensile test. This allows the specific electrical resistance of the test specimen to be determined as a function of fiber elongation, for example, in addition to the material parameters obtained in the tensile test. A separate reference test stand was developed at the ILK in order to compare the test stands and validate the measurement results using extensive series of measurements with defined test parameters.
The developed system complements the capabilities of the commercially available FAVIMAT+ fiber tensile tester from Textechno. In order to enable the characterization of yarns, the developed system was also transferred to the STATIMAT ME+ yarn tensile tester and likewise validated with reference measurements at the ILK.