Abstract: This paper deals with an inverse problem of estimating bilayer textile fabrics thickness based on a one-dimensional steady-state heat and moisture transfer model. We first present a model of heat and moisture transfer for bilayer textile materials, which are two ordinary equations of temperature and humidity. We transform them into two two-point initial and boundary values problems by decoupling and solve them by finite difference method. According to the requirement of thermal and moisture comfort of clothing, we formulate this inverse heat and moisture transfer problem that estimate the thickness of inner fabric as an optimization problem with least square solution. Furthermore, we use particle swarm algorithm to solve this inverse problem. Numerical experiments show that our inverse problem is quiet acceptable, and the proposed numerical method is validity and robust.

Key words: textile material, thickness design, model of geat and moisture transfer for bilayer textile, inverse problem, particle swarm algorithm