Located in the North Carolina State University College of Textiles,
T-PACC incorporates a comprehensive infrastructure of equipment
and personnel to address the need for integrated research on all
aspects of the protection and comfort of clothing. T-PACC is a
broad base facility with unique scientific abilities.The facilities
permit scientific investigation of comfort and protection from
fabric swatch level, all the way to full ensemble systems.
The Textile Comfort labs include the complete Kawabata system for
fabric hand evaluation, state-of-the-art sweating skin models,
a full-range walk-in environmental
chamber capable of rapidly cycling through common or extreme temperature and
humidity conditions, plus facilities and exercise equipment required for human
textile comfort response protocols.
T-PACC features a thermal manikin called Coppelius, which is housed
in the environmental
chamber. Coppelius is one of only two "sweating manikins" in the world
and allows T-PACC to make objective, safe and precise predictions of human comfort
response and heat stress under diverse climatic and work load conditions.
T-PACC also has PyroMan, a fully instrumented, life-size manikin capable of evaluating
the performance of thermal protective clothing against fire exposure. The potential
tissue burn damage to a wearer is predicted when exposed to a realistic simulation
of a flash fire condition. PyroMan is one of only a few such manikins in the
world, and the only one of its kind in a university research setting in the United
States.
Used together for research, PyroMan and Coppelius provide an
unparalleled capacity to generate information useful for developing
materials and garments with superior
comfort, or reduced heat stress, while maintaining the essential ability to
protect against hazardous thermal exposures.
T-PACC labs are equipped with a variety of state-of-the-art tests
for evaluating other important aspects of protections including
resistance to chemical, aerosol
and biological agents as well as a lab devoted to static dissipation of fabrics
|
