A Study of the Mechanical Properties of Woven Silk Fabrics. Part III: A Study of the Extensibility of Continuous-filament Woven Silk Fabrics in the Small-load Region

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Abstract
Continuous–filament woven silk fabrics have a very low tensile modulus in the small-load region compared with woven fabrics of other fibres having a similar structure. In the silk fabrics, there may exist a small gap between the warp and weft threads at their crossover points because of the sericin-removing treatment that is applied after weaving. The tensile behaviour of a fabric with such a gap is considered to consist of two stages. In the first stage, the bent yarn alone is stretched in the initial state of tensile deformation without any mechanical interactions between the warp and weft threads. Since the bending rigidity of silk yarns is small and the gap is relatively large, the tensile modulus of silk fabrics becomes very low in the initial tensile region. After the contact of the warp and weft threads, the soft lateral-compressional property of the silk threads leads to extensibility of the silk fabric. This stage is called here the second stage, in which the tensile and the lateral-compressional deformation properties are mainly concerned with the tensile behaviour of the fabric in this region. Silk–fibroin fibre has a small fibre crimp, and this crimp also makes the silk yarn compressible. In this paper, the extensibility of silk fabrics is analysed, with a theoretical estimation of the extensibility, and an experiment to explain the reason for the high extensibility of silk fabrics is reported.