The invention relates to an apparatus and method to evaluate ease to iron a fabric or textile.
Ease of ironing is an important claim in fabric care applications. Fabrics and textile treatments that can be incorporated into clothing items that reduce effort in ironing or increase ease of ironing are important. Ease of ironing should not be confused with wrinkle reduction, which may be realized by chemical energy. Ease of ironing is the smoothing of a fabric with a flat object achieved by applying mechanical force to the fabric. Ease of ironing is reduction in the amount of labor or effort to iron.
Consumer care customers use various ease of ironing test protocols to evaluate a reduction in amount of effort involved to iron. Rose, U.S. Pat. No. 3,976,583 relates to a fabric treatment that has a lubricating effect that reduces frictional resistance to the movement of an iron. Thus the effort of ironing garments treated with the Rose compositions is appreciably lessened. The Rose patent further discloses a method and mechanism for determining “ironing ease.” In the Rose test method, cotton and polyester/cotton handkerchiefs are washed at 140° F. in a 0.1 percent solution of an anionic detergent-based commercial heavy duty household washing composition (“Cheer”—Procter and Gamble) for 10 minutes, rinsed in water at 105° F. for 10 minutes, spin-dried and tumble-dried at 140° F. for 20 minutes. A 20/1 ratio of water to dry fabric by weight is used in both the wash and rinse. The rinse water for reference fabrics contained no additives other than the 7 gr/gal. hardness present in all wash and rinse solutions. The treatment rinse contained varying amounts of ammonioamidate or a quaternary ammonium compound. Rose then determined “ease of ironing” by a measurement of frictional force within a fabric and between fabric and an iron using a modified Instrom tensile strength apparatus. In Rose, ironing is continued to an end point of removal of wrinkles from the fabrics. The ironing effort tensile strength values relative to water rinsed cotton at a value of 100 and water rinsed polyester/cotton blend at a value of 63 are determined by the Instrom instrument.
The Instrom instrument is designed for a wide variety of uses, only one of which is tensile strength. First, it is questionable whether a tensile reading is relatable to ease of ironing in a real operational environment. Additionally, the Rose methodology to determine “ease of ironing” on this instrument is not always accurate. The methodology to prepare samples and to operate the Instrom instrument is complex and often inaccurate. As such, the Instrom instrument is of little real value for the specific measuring of a fabric's ironing ease.
There is a need for a standardized, simple apparatus and method to quickly measure and compare an ease of ironing metric among test cloths to permit selection of cloth compositions and treatments that provide superior ease of ironing and appearance.