Studies on animal fibre blended hand made felts: Part I- Physical and mechanical properties^a

Abstract

Wool fibre has been blended separately with camel hair and angora rabbit wool in different proportions and felts of different thicknesses and densities produced as per Indian standards. The felts developed from medium type wool and rabbit hair give lowest density and thickness as required for extra soft quality (64s) felt. It is also observed that the performance

characteristics of felt, i .e. tensile strength and splitting resistance, mainly depend on thickness of felt. The correlation between these two is also very high. The felts developed with pure camel hair give highest tensile strength and quite comparable splitting resistance and density with pure wool felt for making soft quality (48s) felt; however, it gives higher

abrasion loss.