Spatial arrangement of stainless steel fibers within hybrid yarns designed for electromagnetic shielding

Yarns containing textile fibers and fine metal fibers in their structure are often used to produce electrically conductive fabrics. The blending quality of the fiber components in a yarn significantly affects the properties of the yarn and the produced fabric. Therefore, the arrangement of metal fibers in yarn structures needs to be analyzed, which can be done using image analysis and spatial statistics methods. One of the aims of this paper is to introduce a suitable methodology for obtaining adequate cross-sections of a yarn containing metal fibers that would allow the usage of objective image analysis methods to identify the component fibers for subsequent evaluation of spatial arrangement. In this paper, an algorithm for the objective segmentation of the component fibers in a yarn cross-section is proposed, and a methodology for evaluating the spatial arrangement of fibers using spatial statistics data is presented. The second aim is to study the specific arrangement of the fibers in hybrid yarns containing 20 wt% of a conductive component, more precisely extremely thin discrete stainless steel fibers, by the proposed methodology. Based on the results, it is concluded that the metal fibers in the cross-sections of this hybrid yarn are randomly arranged.