Extraction Of Wool Keratin And Finishing Of Ramie Fabric With Wool Keratin Solution

Ramie fabric is popular for its hygroscopicity, antibacterial function and unique fabric style, however, the disadvantages of ramie fabric are poor shape retention and comfortableness, therefore finishing ramie fabric turns to one of hot research subjects. As the biological protein, wool keratin can be extracted from the discarded wool, and it is broadly applied to fabric finishing agent. The paper introduced extracting the wool keratin from the wool by the method of Creduction, the ramie fabric and fiber was finished with the extractive, the finished ramie fabric’s wrinkle resistance, drape property, air permeability, capillary effect and tensile property was analyzed, and the morphological structure, the characteristic groups and the crystal structure of ramie fiber both before and after finishing were observed.The principle of the preparation of wool keratin in this paper is that changing disulfide bond and hydrogen bond between wool macro-molecules, and keeping the macro-molecular main chain integrity. By analyzing the influence on wool dissolving rate with using various reagents, the best solution of dissolved wool was obtained:urea density is7mol/L, the dosage of SDS is2%,2-sulphur ethanol concentration is6%, reaction temperature is50℃, reaction time is ten hours, wool dissolving rate can reach85%.By single factor analysis the technological parameters of treating the ramie fabric with wool keratin, the range of the density of wool keratin solution, the time of treatment and the temperature of treatment can be confirmed. The orthogonal experimental is designed by taking the crease recovery angle, drape coefficient, air permeability, capillary height, tensile strength and breaking elongation as indexes. Both of intuitive analysis and variance analysis were applied to analyze the experimental results, and the processing parameters of wool keratin finishing of ramie fabrics was optimized by fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method. After the analysis, the optimum process conditions are obtained:wool keratin concentration9g/L, finishing time70min, finishing temperature60℃. At this processing condition, the slow elastic fabric reply226.3°. Angle crease, trailer coefficient67.2%, permeability is1108.3mm/s, capillary height52mm, tensile breaking strength324.5N, breaking elongation8.9%.The morphological structure of ramie fiber both before and after finishing was observed by scanning electron microscopy, the characteristic groups of ramie fiber both before and after finishing was analyzed by infrared spectrum, and the crystal structure of ramie fiber both before and after finishing was analyzed by X-ray diffraction. The results showed that, after finishing, there was some irregular keratin which adhered to the surface of ramie fiber, the peaks of ramie fiber feature groups varied in a certain range, and the crystallinity of the fiber decreased from78.02%to74.87%.