Abstract

Owing to their importance to the comfort properties of shoe upper materials during wear, the low stress/strain characteristics of various upper materials have recently attracted the attention of a number of workers. In general these investigations have considered the loads required to deform the material to strains less than 6% and the concomitant permanent set. In this work, however, a systematic investigation of the effect of heat setting upon the relationship between the deformation and hysteresis energies for a commercial full chrome side leather has been made. It has been found that, although heat setting affects the values of the energies and energy ratios measured, the changes produced by variations in heat setting conditions are unlikely to be of importance in practice.