A study on the Low Stress Mechanical properties of spun silk sarees woven on Handloom

The silk handloom industry consumes two-thirds of the raw silk produced domestically in India. It was envisaged to develop a handloom silk saree using spun silk as warp and or weft and study the fabric characteristics in terms of low-stress mechanical properties using Kawabata analysis. Accordingly, a commercially available finer variety of Nm 210/2 spun silk was used as warp and or weft to produce three types of silk sarees and compared with regular reeled silk saree. Two types of spun silk sarees showed significantly lesser bending stiffness when compared to the reeled silk saree that implies, the fabric is less stiff with better drape-ability. The shear rigidity of all the spun silk sarees was significantly lower than that of reeled regular silk saree. It implies that the spun silk fabric can be easily distorted in laying up, marking and cutting. As such it is easy for folding and sleeve insertion during fabric stitching. Also, the spun silk saree possesses tensile, surface and compression properties at par with reeled silk saree. The analysis revealed that the Primary Hand Values (PHV), Koshi (Stiffness), Numeri (Smoothness) and Fukurami (Softness) including the Total Hand Value (THV) for the women’s thin dress material were better than that of regular reeled silk saree. The results of thermal properties revealed that the Q-max, CLO and TIV of the spun silk sarees are significantly better than that of regular reeled silk saree.