Synthesis Of Fluorinated Short-chain Alkyl Acrylate Co-polymer Emulsion And Application On Texitle Finishing

Fluorinated finishing agent has excellent water and oil repellent properties, and most of commercial fluorinated finishing agents are acrylate or methyl acrylate polymers. The fluorocarbon side-chains in copolymer played a very good role in affording both lowing surface energy and hydrophocicity. Long carbon-chain perfluorinated compounds, such as PFOS and PFOA, are difficult to degrade, and are cumulative toxicity. So, EU has a comprehensive ban on their production and use. And soon, United States and Japan will stop producing the chemicals and products containing perfluorootane. Facing the global trends of the ban of PFOS, the development of short-chain fluorinated additives has become a hot research.In the current work, using hexafluoro butyl methacrylate, octafluoropenyl acrylate and hexafluoro-n-butyl methacrylate as fluorinated functional monomer, butyl acrylate (BA) as soft monomer, three different polyfluoroarcylate emulsion PFA1, PFA2 and PFA3 were prepared emulsion polymerization. The influences of polymerization reaction conditions, such as emulsifier agents, monomer ratio and initiator, on co-polymer emulsion were studied by investigating the emulsion stability and emulsion particle size and distribution.Emulsion with different fluorine content polymer was synthesized for each fluorinated alkyl acrylate co-polymer, and applied on textile finishing. The result showed that the more fluorine was introduced into the co-polymer, the better water repellent property was obtained. On reaching the highest water repellency level, increase the fluorine content would not improve water repellent property when the fluorinde content reached to a certain content. The water repellency level of the cotton fabric fhinished by PFA1 emulsion was tested to be up to 80, and contact angle was up to 120o. The water repellency of cotton fabric finished by PFA2 and PFA3 emulsion were tested to be 80 and 90, and contact angle was up to 126 and 130o respectively.The other effect of fluorinated acrylate co-polymer emulsion on the cotton fabric performance was studied. Test was carried out such as contact angle, breaking strength, wrinkle recovery angle, air permeability, whiteness and so on. Whiteness and crease recovery angle of finished fabric were tested to be decreased a little, but tensile strength to be increased. The morphology structure of cotton fiber before and after finishing was researched by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) technique.