Page 111 - Handbook of Properties of Textile and Technical Fibres

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years later the MFD was 21.3 mm and 30% was fine, and in 2015e16 the MFD was
21.0 mm and 44.9% of the clip was fine (AWTA, 2016). As wool fibers get finer,
strength becomes more of an issue. A 25 mm fiber with an intrinsic strength of
200 MPa requires a force of 100 mN to break, whereas an 18 mm fiber only needs
half that force for failure to occur. There have been programs to increase strength
by transgenic means (Rogers, 1990; Bawden et al., 2000; Rogers, 2000a,b) and by
breeding but neither of these approaches is easy or quick. In the short term it is thus
likely to become even more important to process wool in such a way that strength
is maintained. Treatments such as those listed in the previous section need to be
improved and/or new ones developed. This work needs to be underpinned by further
basic research in this area.

3.8 Sources of further information and advice

The book Physical Properties of Textile Fibres by Morton and Hearle (1993) is an
excellent starting point for readers wanting to understand the tensile properties of fi-
bers: while covering all textiles there are significant sections dealing with wool.
Max Feughelman’s book (1997) on the mechanical properties and structure of
alpha-keratin fibers deals more specifically with alpha-keratins and covers much of
his own extensive work on wool. Maclaren and Milligan’s book (1981a), although
only occasionally dealing with physical properties, is an excellent source for under-
standing the chemical reactivity of the wool fiber. For a good summary of the chemical
and physical structure of the wool fiber, see Rippon’s (1992) chapter in Wool Dyeing
and for detailed information on the CMC see the reviews by Leeder (1986) and Bryson
et al. (1992). Rippon and Evans (2012) go into considerable detail on chemical pro-
cessing in their chapter in the Handbook of Natural Fibres. More specifically on the
topic of this chapter there are several good review articles and chapters on wool prop-
erties by Feughelman (1982, 2002), Hearle (2000, 2002, 2003), and Reis (1992) and a
good general encyclopedia article (Rippon et al., 2016) that includes a section on wool
properties. Finally, since 1955 there has been an international conference on wool
every 5 years. The proceedings of the conferences listed below are a superb record
of wool research over the last 60 years:
Proc. 1st Int. Wool Text. Res. Conf., Melbourne, Australia, 1955.
Proc. 2nd Int. Wool Text. Res. Conf., Harrogate, UK, 1960.
Proc. 3rd Int. Wool Text. Res. Conf., Paris, France, 1965.
Proc. 4th Int. Wool Text. Res. Conf., San Francisco, USA, 1970; published in Appl. Polym.
Symp., No. 18, Interscience Publishers, a Division of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York,
1971.
Proc. 5th Int. Wool Text. Res. Conf., Aachen, Germany, 1975.
Proc. 6th Int. Wool Text. Res. Conf., Pretoria, South Africa, 1980.
Proc. 7th Int. Wool Text. Res. Conf., Tokyo, Japan, 1985.
Proc. 8th Int. Wool Text. Res. Conf., Christchurch, NZ, 1990.
Proc. 9th Int. Wool Text. Res. Conf., Biella, Italy, 1995.
Proc. 10th Int. Wool Text. Res. Conf., Aachen, Germany, 2000.