Thickness determination in textile material design: dynamic modeling and numerical algorithms

Textile material design is of paramount importance in the study of functional clothing design. It is therefore important to determine the dynamic heat and moisture transfer characteristics in the human body-clothing-environment system, which directly determine the heat-moisture comfort level of the human body. Based on a model of dynamic heat and moisture transfer with condensation in porous fabric at low temperature, this paper presents a new inverse problem of textile thickness determination (IPTTD). Adopting the idea of the least-squares method, we formulate the IPTTD into a function minimization problem. By means of the finite-difference method, quasi-solution method and direct search method for one-dimensional minimization problems, we construct iterative algorithms of the approximated solution for the IPTTD. Numerical simulation results validate the formulation of the IPTTD and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed numerical algorithms.