Combined salt free dyeing and formaldehyde free finishing of cotton fabrics

Abstract

Cotton is the most widely used cellulosic material in the textile industry, especially for apparel purposes but has a tendency to wrinkle badly, degrading its aesthetic value and having poor smooth drying properties. Dyeing and crease resistance finishing process are applied to improve the wrinkle resistance and its aesthetic value respectively. Conventionally, dyeing and durable finishing of cotton is conducted separately by dyeing cotton first, then finished with a cross-linking agent. However, these traditional processes are time and chemical consuming processes. Many researchers have attempted to combine the dyeing and easy-care finishing process into one step. The challenge was difficult to produce fabrics that have deep shades, good Colour fastness and excellent crease recovery performance simultaneously. Hence, the aim of this work was to conduct combined dyeing and easy-care finishing of cotton fabrics with reactive dyes, citric acid and fibroin solution using a pad–dry–cure methods. In this work, fibroin is used as an additive to enhance the degree of crosslinking and as a cat ionizing agent to improve the exhaustion of the dye. The parameters were investigated and optimized with respect to colour strength, colour fastness and mechanical properties of the treated fabric. The efficiency of combined dyed and finished fabrics with reactive dye, citric acid and fibroin has been studied. Better colour strength, crease recovery angle, breaking strength, and fastness properties were obtained as compared with conventional processes. When the concentration of fibroin increased the K/S values, colour fastness properties, and crease resistance properties were improved.