Study On Extracting Lanolin From Raw Wool By Sub-critical Technology And Its Effect On Wool Fiber

Wool is one of the earliest usage textile fiber in humanity, it is an outstanding, multi-functional natural fiber. Because of its soft luster, full of elasticity and great hygroscopicity property, wool fiber products is attractive to consumers. Lanolin, which was produced by the sebaceous glands of sheep, have strong emulsifying stability, was widely used in chemical industry, light industry, pharmaceuticals and military production. Although lanolin was attached on the wool fiber, the majority lanolin was obtained from waste-water of wool scouring, with a low efficiency. Preparing wool for end use is difficult and complicated, its treatment steps start while wool is on fleece form. Among those processes, scouring of raw wool fibers is a strenuous work. Besides this, it is the first step can influence the destiny of the wool for subsequent usages, however, lots of waste water have a bad effluence on environment. Also the many ecological awareness triggers the studies on eco-friendly processing of wool. The idea of subcritical technology was born, which is an environmentally friendly and advantageous solution for cleaner production of wool textiles with water free and energy preserving.This paper mainly has two aspects content. One take lanolin as a mainly part, using subcritical technology to extract lanolin, optimize the extraction process by response surface methodology to obtain the best extraction conditions, then operate the experiment on the amplification equipment to verify, and test the fatty acid composition and its properties of the wool grease.The other part is studying the effect of subcritical treatment on wool fiber, measuring the fiber removing impurity rate, moisture regain and residual fat rate to characterization the cleaning effect on fiber. The effects of treatment on the surface morphology, thermal property, crystal and chemical structures were investigated by employing scanning electron microscopy(SEM), thermogravimetric /differential thermogravimetric analysis(TG-DTG), X-ray diffraction(XRD), and Fourier transform infrared spectrometry(FT-IR). At the same time, some normal scouring method was also used to clean wool in order to do the contrast analysis.Results show that with the treatment of subcritical on raw wool, the amount of lanolin enriched and the waste water pollution reduces sharply, on the other hand, subcritical treatment has a good cleaning effect on wool fiber traits, its thermal stability enhance, the crystalline structure enlarge, and the surface corrosion on wool scales would partly happen, with has a positive role on fiber mechanical properties.