Studies of chitosan/cotton blended fabric and its application on antimicrobial and wound healing acceleration

Abstract

Developments in bioactive chitosan fibre production have recently allowed chitosan to be applied to surfaces of nonfunctional fabric bases in its pure form or as a blend with other materials. Because of new technology, chitosan can be spun into fibre and blended with inactive fibre material. Consequently, chitosan can now be used without requiring further treatment or finishing processes. The durability and permeability of bioactive textiles can be significantly improved while preserving the advantages of fabric structures. In this study, biofunctional textile materials containing chitosan were fabricated and tested for assessing their suitability for wound care. For the chitosan fibres tested in this article, both mechanical properties and bio-performance were found related to chitosan's core parameter degree of deacelation, which is also reflected in appearance and handfeel. Therefore, it is possible to quickly identify single-component functional fibres through systematic testing and classification. It is important to note that even if the raw material is the same, the nature of the material and fibre can be different depending on the form in which the fibre takes. Through the test of the fibre in solid and solution form, it can be found that the antimicrobial properties tested from the raw material under the commonly used system does not reflect the antimicrobial properties of the fibre products. Therefore, new testing method was developed based on textile testing standards. To solve the problem of chitosan fibre lapping in the process of yarn production, I developed prototypes and conducted trials in spinning factory. The results revealed that the carbon nanotubes/NBR composite material preparation for the conductive roller effectively reduced fibre lapping on the roller during textile manufacture. The resulting yarn products were tested, and it was also found that other than antimicrobial properties exhibited in chitosan fibre form, the chitosan textile considerably improved the proliferation of fibroblast cells. During my study, it was found that fibre distribution in yarn structure influences the functional properties of my functional textile products, but methods for characterising this distribution remain limited. Therefore, two methods for quantifying fibre distribution uniformity were proposed and evaluated. The window variation method (WVM), based on cell counting, randomly selects windows and quantifies the uniformity of one type of fibre in a yarn cross section by calculating the variation of the fibre ratio in each window. The other method is the dilation method (DLM), which quantifies uniformity according to the dilation area of the targeted fibres. Compared to Hamilton index, my methods can better predict the performance of yarn by its cross-sectional distribution of fibres.