Analysis of acoustic characteristics of fabrics in terms of mechanical properties

The purpose of this study was to classify various fabrics into some meaningful groups and to predict the fabrics' acoustic characteristics using their mechanical properties. Two hundred seventeen fabrics, fifty one knitted fabrics, fifty nine woven fabrics and one hundred and seven vapor permeable water repellent fabrics, were used as test specimen. Fabric frictional sounds of the specimen were measured with a MAFN(Measuring Apparatus for Fabric Noise, Patent: No, 2001-73360). Sound Pressure Level(SPL), psychoacoustic parameters such as Loudness(z) and Sharpness(z) of the specimen were obtained by the sound quality system. KES-FB system was used for mechanical property measurements. Cluster analysis was used to classify the specimen and discriminant analysis was used to predict the clusters. Linear regression analysis was used to suggest the equations to predict the acoustic properties using mechanical properties.