Fiber,: Also Spelled Materials Thread Biology Plants Animals Tissues Filaments String Rope Composite Materials Paper Felt
Fiber,: Also Spelled Materials Thread Biology Plants Animals Tissues Filaments String Rope Composite Materials Paper Felt
Fiber,: Also Spelled Materials Thread Biology Plants Animals Tissues Filaments String Rope Composite Materials Paper Felt
to lengths of thread. They are very important in the biology of both plants and animals, for holding tissues together.
Human uses for fibers are diverse. They can be spun into filaments, string or rope, used as a component of composite
materials, or matted into sheets to make products such as paper or felt. Fibers are often used in the manufacture of other
materials. Synthetic fibers can be produced very cheaply and in large amounts compared to natural fibers, but natural
fibers enjoy some benefits, such as comfort, over their man-made counterparts.
Natural fibers are those fibers that are directly from nature, usually from plants or animals. The common natural
fibers are cotton, wool, silk, jute, and flax/linen.
• Wool
Wool is the dense and soft hair derived from the coat of sheep and certain other mammals. For industrial
purposes the fiber of the camel, alpaca, Angora goat, llama, Kashmir goat (the fiber is called cashmere), and
vicuña is classed as wool.
Wool is primarily used in apparel that is intended to keep us warm, because the woolen fibers are non-
conductors of heat and its crimps capture and enmesh the thin air.
Cotton
Cotton is perhaps the most commonly used natural fiber. Derived from the cotton plant which belongs to the
same family as do plants such as hibiscus and okra, the fiber is both economical as well as effective. The
cotton plant is known to have been grown in India over 5000 years ago, and perhaps existed even much before
that.
• Silk
Silk is the soft and shiny fiber that is used in a variety of luxury textiles. By a process known as sericulture,
silk is obtained from the cocoon of the silkworm larva. The shiny appearance of silk comes from the fibres'
triangular prism-like structure, owing to which the fabric refracts light at different angles.
Relative humidity is defined as the ratio of the partial pressure of water vapor in a gaseous mixture of air and water
vapor to the saturated vapor pressure of water at a given temperature. Relative humidity is expressed as a percentage and
is calculated in the following manner:
where
Relative humidity is often mentioned in weather forecasts and reports, as it is an indicator of the likelihood of
precipitation, dew, or fog. In hot summer weather, it also increases the apparent temperature to humans (and other
animals) by hindering the evaporation of perspiration from the skin as the relative humidity rises.
Absolute humidity is the quantity of water in a particular volume of air. The most common units are grams per cubic
meter, although any mass unit and any volume unit could be used. Pounds per cubic foot are common in the U.S., and
occasionally even other units mixing the Imperial and metric systems are used.
If all the water in one cubic meter of air were condensed into a container, the container could be weighed to determine
absolute humidity. The amount of vapor in that cube of air is the absolute humidity of that cubic meter of air. More
technically: the mass of water vapor mw, per cubic meter of air, Va .