Tensile testing of textiles provides the strength and elongation properties for both natural and manmade materials, such as cotton, carbon, polyester, nylon, glass and graphite. Textiles can be tensile tested in many forms, including single strands, yarns, webbing, woven, braided material and nonwoven fabrics. The majority of textile fabric tensile testing is performed as either a grab test, in an effort to eliminate edge effects, or a strip test, including edge effects. For a grab test, the grips clamp a fabric sample in the center using jaws smaller than the sample width.
For a strip test, the grips clamp a strip of fabric using jaws wider than the sample width. For both tests, grip the specimen inside the ends of the sample length. Machines for textile tensile testing are typically low force, high elongation, constant rate of elongation or load and are table-top systems. Although the testing machine may seem like the most important factor for testing with flexible materials, it is essential to consider the movement of grips and clamping fixtures. When testing webbing or fabric-type products, it is important to have free rotation at one of the grip mounts to ensure the grips are in the plane of the textile during the test. Test grips and fixtures must be determined by the specific type of textile being tested and, if the material is tested to a testing standard, the grip requirements will be described in the standard. ASTM and ISO specify test methods and requirements for the testing of textile materials.
Due to the wide variety of textile materials, a single tensile test method would not be able to address all the variations needed to properly test different textiles. Popular ASTM tensile testing standards for textiles are ASTM D751 for coated fabrics, ASTM D1683 for woven fabric seam failure, ASTM D4964 for elongation of elastic fabrics, ASTM D5034 for breaking strength of textile fabrics, ASTM D5035 for breaking force of textile fabrics, ASTM D6775 for breaking strength of webbing and braided materials, and ASTM D7269 for testing aramid or nylon yarns. ASTM D76 specifies the requirements of the most widely used textile tensile test machines, including constant rate of extension (CRE) and constant rate of force or loading (CRL) machines. Our applications engineers are available for all your textile testing questions.