engleski

Advanced use of thermography for the development of highly functional sportswear

The performance of an athlete in different sports is highly dependent on the characteristics of specific sportswear, and the material used for its production. For the development of next-to-skin sportswear, knitted fabrics are preferable due to increased stretchability, shape retention while stretching, good draping ability, and wrinkle recovery. During different sports activities, which include different body movements, intensive sweating appears. For this reason, the preferred sportswear fabric should regulate the sweat transfer from the body, instead of absorbing it, in order to make the athlete more comfortable. Therefore, sportswear material must act as an effective sweat carrier. In certain conditions specific for cold environments, such materials also work as heat barriers to maintain thermal balance. Sportswear interacts with physiological and physical processes that affect skin temperature. The change in skin temperature due to different processes can be assessed by infrared thermography. Infrared thermography has over the years become very popular in various fields, like mechanical engineering, construction, energy, traffic, medicine, clothing technology, etc. The thermograms are useful for the observation of temperature changes, as well as to visualize differences in the recorded object. In the field of textile engineering, thermography has been used to observe both the changes in body temperature, as well as to observe the changes in the material properties related to mass transfer. The experiment presented in this paper focuses on the advanced use of thermography in the interdisciplinary field that covers material engineering, physiology, and sports science. More specifically, it focuses on the use of thermography to determine the sorption properties of sportswear materials, as well as the performance of those materials when designed and worn by an athlete during a sports activity. In the first part of the experiment, the liquid was applied to each sample in order to observe its transfer and to determine important characteristics such as the wetting time, wetting diameter, wetting surface in the direction of x- and the y-axis, and drying time. In the second part, the experiment was focused on studying the changes in body temperature of football players. Before and after warm-up training, temperature measurements were taken on the entire body of the volunteer. The results are presented in the form of thermograms and discussed in light of the materials used.

thermography ; sport ; material ; knitted fabric ; polyester

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