The effect of weight per square meter of cotton fabrics on durable press finishing with 1, 2, 3, 4 butanetetracarboxylic acid

Abstract

. Cellulosic fibres, like cotton, are characterized by good properties. However, during their use and maintenance, textiles made with these fibres show high capacity of shrinkage, wrinkling and little wrinkle recovery. In order to solve this behaviour, cotton fabrics are treated applying crosslinkers agents in combination with an appropriate catalyst. In this study, 1, 2, 3, 4 butanetetracarboxylic acid (BTCA) and a catalyser, sodium hypophosphite NaH2PO2 . H2O (SHP) were used to treat two cotton fabrics in order to get easy care properties. To study the influence of the weight per square meter of the fabrics, weave fabrics with 110 and 210 g/m2 were treated by padding system using 80 g/L of BTCA and 40 g/L of SHP. Once the treatment was applied, the samples were dried at 80ºC and cured at 160ºC, these conditions are necessary to carry out the cross-linking reaction between cellulose and BTCA. Results show that fabric with less weight per square meter has an increase of 20% of free carboxylic groups, however the fabric of higher weight presents an increase of 120%. To calculate the increase in free carboxylic groups, it has been taken into account the number of those groups from the same fabric before the treatment. As a conclusion, we can confirm that modification of properties are achieved more effectively when the treatment of polycarboxylic acids is performed on cellulosic fabrics with higher content of oxycellulose groups and this factor influence is higher than the g/m 2 .