Measuring the wicking behavior of textiles by the combination of a horizontal wicking experiment and image processing

A horizontal wicking experiment is proposed to measure the wicking behavior of textiles. A syringe supplying a continuous flow of distilled water is in contact with the absorbing fabric resulting in a wicking region. The increase in wicking area or the wicking area after a certain time is recorded with a digital camera. The picture analyzing process is automated by the use of two complementary image segmentation algorithms: morphological segmentation and region merging. Where commercial image analyzing software fails due to the specific porous structure of textiles, the developed algorithms succeed in calculating the wicking area semiautomatically. It is shown that the newly developed technique is able to test the wicking behavior of, e.g., a cotton fabric and a plasma treated polyester nonwoven.