Effects of alkali pretreatment on lyocell woven fabric and its influence on pilling properties

Abstract

Experiments were conducted to study the influence of various concentration of alkalis on the pilling properties of lyocell fabrics. Generally, the lyocell fabric has more tendency of pill formation due to fibrillation properties. Therefore, present work is focused on the impact of alkali pretreatments with various concentration from 0.5 mol/L to 3 mol/L on lyocell with their pilling resistance. Due to the morphological changes, pilling results are attributed to the alkali types and their concentration. Treatment with TmAH and LiOH at 2 mol/L shows the reduction of a number of fibrils leading to reduce the pill generation significantly. Carboxyl content and iodine sorption value are analyzed to find the impact of alkali on the accessible region and structural changes respectively, also surface modification was observed by SEM to confirm the surface characteristics. Overall results shows that the reduction of fibrillation leads to better pilling resistance of lyocell fabric.

Keywords:

• Alkali treatment
• defibrillation
• fibrillation tendency
• fuzz
• lyocell
• pilling tendency

Acknowledgements

First, I would like to thank Prof. Doc. Michal Vik Ph.D and their LCAM team for capturing the pilling images from Imager-I. Also, thanks to the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic and the European Union – European Structural and Investment Funds in the frames of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education – project Hybrid Materials for Hierarchical Structures (HyHi, Reg. No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000843) for providing the facilities to carried out this work.

Disclosure statement

The authors reported no potential conflict of interest.