English
Athletic clothes are designed to maximize the potential of athletes during exercise, and to provide comfort and maintain physical health when worn for outdoor activities.
Outdoor activities often involve traveling through muddy and moist terrains, making it unavoidable for athletic clothes to get dirty. Therefore, high-quality athletic apparel is designed to be resistant to stains and easy to clean when stained. Changing the surface properties of fibers significantly improves the tension of fabrics, making it difficult for oil and other stains to penetrate into the fabric. Minor stains can be wiped off with a damp cloth, while heavier stains are easy to clean. Stain-resistant finishes not only prevent oil pollution but also have the ability to waterproof and breathe, and are commonly known as "three-proof finishes" (waterproof, oil-proof, and stain-proof). They are a practical and effective way of advanced chemical finishing, commonly used in outerwear, backpacks, shoes, and tent fabrics.
During exercise, large amounts of sweat are released, and outdoor activities often involve rain and snow, which is a contradiction. The athletic clothes, including custom yoga clothes, need to be able to prevent rain and snow from soaking through but also allow sweat to be released quickly. Fortunately, the water vapor released from the human body is in a single-molecule state, while rain and snow are in a gathered state, and their volume and size differ greatly. In addition, liquid water has a characteristic called surface tension, which gathers its own volume. Water droplets seen on lotus leaves appear in the form of droplets rather than spread out water stains. It is because the surface of lotus leaves has a layer of wax-covered fluffy tissue, and water droplets cannot spread or penetrate into this layer of waxy fluff due to surface tension. If you dissolve a drop of detergent or laundry powder in a water droplet, the detergent can greatly reduce the surface tension of the liquid, and the water droplets will immediately break up and spread out on the lotus leaf.
Waterproof and breathable high-quality athletic apparel use the surface tension properties of water and apply a PTFE-enhanced chemical coating to the surface of the fabric to maximize the tension of the fabric. The coating makes water droplets shrink as much as possible and prevents them from spreading and infiltrating the fabric surface, thereby preventing them from penetrating through the pores of the fabric. At the same time, this coating is porous, and water vapor in a single-molecule state can easily diffuse through the capillary pores between fibers and scatter to the surface of the fabric.
Although warmth is closely related to fabric thickness, custom athletic clothes such as horse riding clothes must not be too heavy, as it is against the special requirements of outdoor athletic clothes. The most common method is to add special ceramic powders containing chromium oxide, magnesium oxide, and zirconia to the spinning solution of synthetic fibers such as polyester. Especially, nano-level fine ceramic powder can absorb visible light such as sunlight and convert it into heat energy, and can also reflect the far-infrared rays emitted by the human body, thus having excellent thermal insulation and heat storage properties. Of course, far-infrared ceramic powder, adhesive and crosslinking agents can also be formulated into finishing agents, which can be applied to woven fabrics for coating treatment, and then dried and baked to make nano-ceramic powders adhere to the surface of the fabric and yarn.
