In the present work the effect of fineness of melt spun polypropylene fibers on behaviour of structured needled fabric having cord surface effect during compession cycle was studied. Data were obtained using Delphi program. Various fiber fineness were achivied by varying the spinning pump speed. Hough transfom was incoporated in the used image processing technique. Oreientatio of fibers in the exprimental samples was determined using the Hough transform incorporated image processing technique. The purpose of the technique is to find imperfect instances of objects within a certain class of shapes by a voting procedure. This voting procedure is carried out in a parameter space, from which object candidates are obtained as local maxima in a so-called accumulator space that is explicitly constructed by the algorithm for computing the Hough transform. This technique premitted the recovery of more than 95% of the main lines of the images. Simple mathematical relationships were used in the developement of a geometrical model. It was found that the model yeilds a smaller number of surface loops in comparison to the number of loops counted using image processing technique. Application of finite element analysi in Abaqus environment allowed the full compressive behaviour of the fabrics to be defined. Results showed that, an increase in the fineness of fibers causes the fiber loop density to be reduced. This intrurn tended to reduce the force needed to compress the samples to a pre-defined thickness. It can be stated that, inter-fiber frictional force is proportinal to cube of fiber fineness provided the coefficient of friction is assumed to be constant. Additionally it was found that, in the case of sample produced using 15 denier fibers, inter-fiber frictional force is at its maximum value. It was concluded that, generally in comparison to unfinished samples, tensile properties of the samples impragnated with Latex are significantly improved. In this respect the effect of Latex addition on tensile properties is more in machine direction in comparison to the observed improvement in cross-machine direction
