Reactive Dyeing And UV Protection Finishing Of Silk Blends

Silk has many excellent properties such as good touch feeling, good wearing comfort, soft luster, etc. However, it also has the shortcomings of yellowing, creasing and high price. The blends of silk with other fibers(e.g., viscose and nylon) can greatly improve the disadvantages of pure silk fabrics. Silk/viscose blend can be dyed with acid and neutral dyes/direct dyes in one bath or two baths, but the dyeings have wet color fastness and the two-bath dyeing procedure needs long process time. Silk/nylon blend can be dyed with acid dyes, but its wet color fastness is poor as well. Both silk/viscose and silk/nylon blends are light-weight fabric, their resistance to ultraviolet ray is poor. In the light of the problems existing in the dyeing and finishing processes of silk/viscose and silk/nylon blends, reactive dyes were applied for the dyeing of silk/viscose and silk/nylon blends, and reactive and non-reactive UV absorbers were applied for the UV protection finishing of silk/viscose and silk/nylon blends. The major results of this study were in the following:Temperature and soda dosage had great influence on the pretreatment of silk/viscose blend; the good union dyeing effect was able to be achieved when silk/viscose fabric was dyed with reactive dyes under the conditions of medium temperature and appropriate soda dosage. When silk/nylon blend was dyed with reactive dyes, the dye exhaustion and fixation were greatly influenced by the p H values of dye-bath, and the color depth of dyed silk and nylon was affected by p H, temperature and soda dosage by different degrees. The dyed silk/viscose and silk/nylon blends exhibited good color fastness.When reactive UV-absorber was applied for the UV protection finishing of silk/viscose blend, its adsorption increased with decreasing soda dosage and increasing sodium sulfate, and was little affected by temperature. The silk/viscose blend finished with reactive UV-absorber exhibited good UV protection performance.When non-reactive UV-absorber was applied for the UV protection finishing of silk/nylon blend, it had high uptake under the conditions of low p H and medium temperature. The silk/nylon blend finished with non-reactive UV-absorber displayed excellent UV protection ability.