Assessment of the Compressibility of Textile Interior Floor Coverings

Abstract

Unavoidable decoration of the hotel interiors are textile floor coverings that should have, besides aesthetic functions, thermal and acoustic insulation properties and high durability in use. One of performance tests affecting the use and durability of textile floor coverings is to determine their thickness after unloading. The paper describes the properties of compressibility and thickness during relaxation of ten samples of wool carpets. An equation to describe the relationship between the thickness and the associated pressure of textile floor coverings based on Bogaty‘s equation of state has been proposed. The parameters, i.e. the unknown constants A and B represented by the equation can be readily determined for particular textile floor coverings by empirical means, and the resulting equation can then be used to determine the thickness of the fabric prior to compression, by prolonged compression and any pressure in the range from 0.4 to 100 hPa according to the agreed conditions. The resulting functional relationship is useful to display the entire pressure-thickness curve in one cycle of loading and unloading the textile floor covering. If the form of the equation has been appropriately selected, the calculated thickness values match the measured thicknesses at different pressures very well. During testing several methods to assess the quality of textile floor coverings were used. With their help the objectively best floor covering out of several proposed ones classified by was selected. To assess the quality of floor coverings accurately, methods of quality assessment such as arithmetic mean, exponential mean value and area under a polynomial curve can be applied.