Although there exist a couple of instruments claimed to measure feeling of touch, PhabrOmeter® is the only one that can connect instrument test to sensory evaluation results.

• A need from manufacturer and user for fast and easy objective measurement of fabric feel has always existed and remaining unfulfilled.
• Understanding and being able to differentiate fabric feel attributes become increasingly important.
• Pleasant sense of touch often dictates the success of many new products and treatments.

Also, PhabrOmeter® is much more convenient to use, to manage and analyze your data, at a price more reasonable than most instruments at this level.

Actually it doesn't matter what kind of materials, as long as it is in a sheet or membrane form and is not highly rigid.

Sure you can, and that should be the major application of the PhabrOmeter® technology, easy and reliable. For example you can first save a set of high quality fabric samples you desire for each product line. You test them using PhabrOmeter® to get all the properties data and fingerprints for each product and save them in the database as your references. You can then test the samples from your suppliers again using PhabrOmeter. By comparing the results with those saved in your database on the PhabrOmeter, you can readily determine if all the goods have the quality you expected.

When consumers select a car for their daily life, they pick the one that are more comfortable to sit in and drive. PhabrOmeter® technology has been used to evaluate all the fabrics, plastic and rubber sheets used for interior, seats, steering wheels and instrument panel covering.

Using detailed stiffness, smoothness and softness data from PhabrOmeter®, you can develop your own specs and control the qualities of the materials from the suppliers. PhabrOmeter® also contributes to reduce production costs by shortening development cycles and improving process yields owing to the easy control of product quality.

Yes, the same terms in the two systems represent more or less different attributes, because the determination of these attributes in KES system relied on Japanese hand panels and hence with inherent ambiguities and overlapping. But in PhabrOmeter® system, these attributes are separated from each other as the principal components. We borrow the terminology out of expedience to make them easier to accept by our clients.

Not yet, huge efforts and wide collaborations required.

The full scale requires testing of all possible fabrics in the range; it is to be determined.

The PhabrOmeter and Kawabata have totally different measurement concept so they are not comparable. It is our finding that the correspondence of the attribute values and fabric performance depend on the fabric types. Different fabric density types and different structures may have different trends.

In our case study B on woven fabric, it is a group of medium twill woven fabrics, for this type of fabrics, a smaller softness value represents a softer fabric and a bigger stiffness value represents a harder fabric; However, for the knit fabric, even if it has the same medium type of density, its trend maybe opposite with the woven type.

As a common practice, many of our clients use a control fabric or a reference fabric to determine the correspondence between the trend of the attributes and the fabric ranking.

Very small due to the high repeatability of the instrument- 3 repeats maximum.

Yes, for fabrics in different group types, different eigen-matrices are provided and have to be used.

Yes, this is the immediate application.

They were produced using high precision digital milling machine. We also have a software calibration routine to eliminate drift and any system errors.

Yes, using the statistical criterion to determine the testing sample size.