Study On Mercerizing Process Of Wool Carpets Combined With Protease And Mechanical External Force

Wool carpet is characteristic of the appearance of luxury, fluffy texture, warm touch and elasticity, is a kind of high-grade indoor textile products. Wool carpet without processing of stripping scales, has defect of roughness surface, rough hand, and less gloss. Stripping scales of wool fiber using appropriate methods, can lead to decrease of wool fiber’s fineness, reduction of friction coefficient of the fiber surface, and not only improvement of the dimensional stability of carpet during application, also soft hand, smooth feel and silky luster. The carpet industry also used to call the process of damaging or peeling wool fiber surface scales as mercerizing of wool carpet. At present, carpet production enterprises in China still use traditional alkaline hypochlorite process to mercerize wool carpet, the process will produce absorbable organic halides (AOX), causing pollution to the environment. Therefore, it has the vital significance to research and development a new mercerized wool finishing process that is little or no pollution to environment.Wool carpet mercerizing principle and process of combined action of proteases and mechanical force is studied in this paper. The process combines the protease biological reduction effect and mechanical physical cutting grinding effect, so as to achieve the purpose of reasonably peeling off wool scales, the process overcomes pollution of the chloride method to the environment, also avoids excessive damage for wool fiber that relying solely on proteases or the chemical action of chemicals.Effects of different pretreatment process of proteases treatment was studied, the wool carpet mercerizing process of one bath one step treatment of TCEP and protease and to assist to the physical role of external mechanical forces was determined in the paper. Mechanism and effect of TCEP and protease on wool and structure of wool fiber were analyzed by infrared spectroscopy (IR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) energy spectrum method, and through wool yarn shrinkage, reduction rate, fiber strength and fiber fineness, alkali dissolution index,the finishing effect was studied, and the optimal finishing process was given by author.Studies have shown that after one bath treatment of TCEP and protease, the wool fiber microstructure change, regularity of wool decreased, the crystallinity decreased. XPS results show, TCEP can effectively remove the lipoid of wool scale surface; at the same time, the content of s(II) reduced, s(VI) content increased, indicating thatTCEP can make the disulfide bond is reduced and fracture, in the air is oxidized to cystine oxide. Therefore, TCEP treatment destroyed the cuticle layer and compact structure of hydrophobic, is conducive to the hydrolysis reaction catalyzed by protease to the keratin of scale layer.On the basis of TCEP and protease reduction treatment, applied external mechanical forces on wool fiber, physical cutting grinding effect of external mechanical forces can promote softened or damaged wool flake off, improved efficiency and uniformity of scale stripping. Study found that, despite the external mechanical forces can not handle the fineness of wool fibers decreased significantly, can make the wool scales been effectively stripped. Using optimized process of one bath method of TCEP and protease combined with mechanical processing technology, the fineness of wool carpet fiber fell a micron, low strength loss and upper carpet fiber scales disappeared.