A New Approach to the Objective Evaluation of Fabric Handle from Mechanical Properties

Fabric handle evaluation can be reduced to a typical clustering problem, and fuzzy cluster analysis is applied to a practical example in this paper. For comparison, the same example is also tackled using hierarchical cluster methods of multivariate analysis. Both kinds of results have been found to be consistent. To determine the optimum group number g of clustering, Marriot's g 2 | W| criterion is suggested and the result is demonstrated as satisfactory; consequently it will be possible to use discriminant analysis to evaluate fabric handle.