Improvement on Hydrophobicity of Synthetic Textiles by Plasma Treatment – A Review

Cationic dyes exhibit high exhaustion towards protein fibres, such as wool and silk, due to ionic interactions but they show little substantivity onto cellulosic and hemicellulosic fibres. In order to apply cationic dyes to mill scoured and bleached linen fibers, a new approach employing anionic agents containing a reactive monochloro-S- triazinyl group is synthesized and used to import a negative charge to the fibre surface. Two cationic dyes show considerable substantivity towards anionic agent modified fabrics. Four different anionic agents are covalently bounded to the linen substrate to provide an electrostatic interaction with cationic dyes. The anionic agent treated fabrics are monitoredfor nitrogen content, and the reaction efficiency is determined as a K/S value of the dyed samples. Different factors that affect the pretreatment and dyeing process are investigated, and an overall improvement in the effectiveness of the anionic agent on the dyeability using cationic dyes is achieved. The reaction efficiency for the four anionic agents follows the order: anionic agent III > I > II > IV > untreated fabric. The treated dyed fabrics also exhibit good fastness properties.