Liquid Transport across Fabric Layers

This paper shows qualitatively that for a fabric to wick water from one layer to another, the dry fabric layer must have a certain hydrophilicity to attract the water out of the wet layer. Some of the water that a fabric takes up is contained among its fibers and is a function of how many fibers the fabric has in its yarns and how many yarns per unit volume the fabric has. Water is also contained in the yarn interstices. For conventional textile fabrics, water will move from the inter-fiber and inter-yarn pores of the wet fabric into those of the initially-dry similar fabric until and equilibrium is established between the two layers. This equilibrium is reached when sufficient water has entered the dry fabric such that the water bridges the spaces among the fibers. The dry layer will stop accepting water when its inter-fiber pore and inter-yarn pores of equivalent size are full. Abstracts in English and French.