High-performance cut-resistant fabrics are manufactured in many ways and for a variety of purposes, including protective clothing and the secure coverage of personal property and property.

In most cases, any risk derived from serious cuts must be eliminated from the work activity. However, some cutting hazards often cannot be eliminated due to the nature of the job, therefore the use of cut resistant clothing (a type of personal protective equipment) should always be considered when there is a realistic risk and identifiable as being accidentally cut or, in other cases, cut by an aggressive member of the public or a detainee.

Most minor cut incidents occur to the hands, simply because these are normally the parts of the body closest to the operation that involves a sharp piece of metal or glass within the industrial sectors, or involves a knife, broken bottle or another type of edged weapon within the homeland. security sectors.

Generally, other parts of the body can be protected with the latest industrial type of cut resistant clothing or with cut resistant clothing related to ‘body armor’ for national security applications. Something that has been designed and developed over the past few years to help effectively protect national security professionals, for example prison officials or law enforcement officers, from rapid blood loss following cutting and penetration of arteries by a hostile and out-of-control individual.

Incidents such as the extremely brutal and near-fatal assault on Prison Officer Craig Wylde at the Frankland High Security Prison (UK) in March 2010 have been widely reported in various countries around the world. Outrageous attacks like this have made the potential use of cut or cut resistant fabrics a serious cause of discussion in health and safety departments around the world.

When the technical fabrics used for this type of protective clothing have high cut resistance, a method specified in the widely respected ISO 13997: 1999 is used. It has become the true benchmark for testing cut resistant fabrics from high performance.

The ISO 13997: 1999 method uses a straight blade that is passed through a piece of test cloth until the cut is made. The principle of this test is to vary the load to be applied to the blade to facilitate cutting over a known distance.

This test machine used for this standard and test includes a straight blade of a precise level of sharpness, mounted on a carriage, which is only capable of horizontal movement to drag the blade through the sample. The fabric swatch is mounted on a curved surface. In turn, this is placed on top of a series of devices to apply a force from below the sample holder onto the sheet, which simulates a force or weight that is placed on top of the sheet itself. The sheet is passed through the sample at a fixed speed, and the distance traveled to the cut is recorded.

Cut is identified when electrical contact is established between the blade itself and the fabric clamping device.

The test procedure begins by making a series of cuts using a variety of weights that are applied to the blade to obtain a suitable range of cut lengths. Typically these are five cuts in the 5-15mm range, five cuts in the 15-30mm range, and five cuts in the 30-50mm range.

From a graph that will be part of the official test report, an estimate of the applied load required to obtain a 20mm stroke length can be obtained prior to cutting.

With this estimate, another five shear tests are carried out. If the average of these five cuts is within a suitable tolerance of 20mm, an additional estimate is taken from the new graph and recorded as the final result.

If the average of the five cuts is out of tolerance, the new estimate is used for another five cuts. The final estimate of this third graph becomes the final result of the test. The test result is based on the estimated force required to generate a stroke length of 20mm. The result is expressed in Newton.

The main purpose of the ISO 13997: 1999 cut resistance test is to provide data for comparison between fabrics (the higher the force, the higher the cut resistance). It enables companies to clearly highlight the level of cut resistance their fabric offers, allowing any uniform, tactical apparel, or any other type of manufacturing facility to make an informative decision on which fabric is most appropriate for the chosen application. The ISO 13997: 1999 support and test method is widely considered to be generally more accurate for high levels of shear strength. However, that said, it is also significantly slower and more expensive to perform compared to testing.