ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the evaluation of the pore structure of textile materials, particularly as that structure relates to liquid absorption and to the porous barrier characteristics of these and related planar materials. The textile production process is remarkably flexible, allowing the manufacture of fibrous materials with widely diverse physical properties. All textiles are discontinuous materials in that they are produced from macroscopic sub-elements. Porosity is one of the important physical quantities that are used to describe textile materials. The porosity of a material can be experimentally determined by a number of methods, including those based on direct gravimetric and volumetric measurements, optical techniques, liquid imbibition and gas expansion. Pore size distributions in nonwovens are typically unimodal and relatively broad, with a range of values that may cover several orders of magnitude. Woven fabrics manufactured from continuous monofilaments, sometimes referred to as screening fabrics, have pore dimensions that are essentialy monodisperse.
