An indirect method for fast evaluation of surface moisture absorptivity of shirt and underwear fabrics

Customers wearing shirts understand, that the feeling of comfort when wearing shirts in hot days should depend on their vater vapour permeability and their moisture sorption capacity, but both these parameters do not characterise the thermal contact comfort feeling of shirt fabrics in wet state. In order to explain the thermal contact comfort of superficially wetted shirts, a new parameter called moisture absorptivity was introduced and a simple equation of the moisture transfer between the fabric and skin was derived in the paper. Since the direct measurement of the moisture absorptivity is complicated, an indirect method for its experimental determination was described and used for the evaluation of thermal comfort of fabrics contacting wet human skin