Scald Burn Protection of the Commercially Available Children’s Sleepwear

Children’s sleepwear is often recalled from the consumer market due to non-conformance; however, scholarly articles auditing the thermal protection performance of commercially available children’s sleepwear are scarce. Moreover, the protection against hot liquid exposure, a prevalent cause of child burn injury, has never been studied. This study examines the integrity of the commercially available children’s sleepwear with Flammable Fabrics Act, and thermal protection performance against hot splash. Sleepwear knitted in different structures with different fiber compositions were selected and exposed to vertical flammability tester and hot liquid tester. A very poor splash protection was observed by all the fabrics under study. Although, all of the fabrics passed the vertical flammability test; dangerous molten polymer hazard posed by the synthetic polyester fabrics calls for a careful selection of fibers for this sophisticated class of apparel. A better protection performance could be envisioned should the fabrics were made rich of inherently flame-retardant fibers.

Keywords: Children’s sleepwear; Vertical flammability; Thermal protection; Scald (splash) protection; Jersey knit; Interlock knit; Modacrylic fiber