The Effect of Pattern Construction on Tactile Feeling as Determined Using Tactile Sensory Analysis.

The article provides information on a study which investigated the effects of different woven construction parameters of cotton fabrics on tactile feelings. The ability to test with instruments the tactile feeling of fabrics in a reliable and meaningful manner very often met with failure. However, customer's choices are more and more based on multisensorial feature, and particularly on touch. In order to overcome this problem, it becomes essential to be able to take tactile quality of a textile product into account in the product development process and to predict sensory perception of textile fabrics on the basis of physical properties. Sensory analysis methodologies were applied to obtain Quantitative Descriptive Description of fabrics woven on Jacquard loom with the same yarn, but with different patterns. By using statistical methods of factor analysis, 5 non-relevant attributes were removed and sensory attributes were abstracted into two sensory independent factors. Principle Component Analysis on the mean score of the panel across replication allows visualization and interpretation of the results, even part of the information in the data set is lost during the abstraction process.