A study of catalytic system for cotton finishing treatment

Abstract

Cotton is an essential natural textile fibre and plays an important role in our daily life because of its various usages. However, there are some defects of cotton cellulose fabrics which are easily wrinkling after being washed or immersed in water and sensitive to fire causing fatalities. Applying wrinkle-resistant finishing and flame-retardant finishing on cotton cellulose are the major issues studied in this thesis. The formulations of the two functional finishes were modified with addition of metal oxides and varying the curing condition in order to attain the best fabric performance after treatment. Different combinations of curing temperature and curing time have been studied to investigate the performance of functional finishing. It was found that curing temperature and curing time have significant effect on the wrinkle-resistant performance and the flame-retardant performance. Higher curing temperature and longer curing time resulted in a better performance as there was sufficient energy and duration for the reaction occurred. Moreover, it was confirmed that the addition of titanium dioxide (TiO2) have positive influence to the fabric functional performance with lower curing temperature. The treatment effectiveness can be enhanced by the addition of metal oxides which can improve the adverse effects of the treatment. The surface morphology was examined by scanning electron microscopy and other advanced analytical techniques that gave the structural information of the treated fabrics. Besides, the role of TiO2 in the two finishing treatments had been proposed. Finally, as fabric hand is a critical physical property of fabrics, the objective measurement of low stress mechanical properties had been investigated by KES-F in order to evaluate the fabric hand. The fabric hand became worse than the untreated cotton fabrics after functional finishing.