Properties Improvement on Polyester Fabric Using Polyvinyl Alcohol

Abstract

Polyethylene terephthalate is one of the important synthetic ester polymeric material used in widespread areas. In textile industry, this fibrous material finds use in most of the garment and apparel applications due to its ease of handling, maintenance, and drying and competes with cotton materials. However, due to the maximum hydrophobic behavior, this textile material gives number of issues like accumulation of statics, negligible moisture content, poor comfort and aesthetic characters. Hence, in order to use this polyester material in the general textile industries particularly for garment and apparel productions, it is necessary to increase to some extent of its hydrophilic character by the application of some suitable chemicals like polyvinyl alcohol. In these context, in this work an attempt is made to treat the polyethylene terephthalate fabric with sodium hydroxide followed by polyvinyl alcohol so as to increase the aesthetic properties. The output received after the polyvinyl alcohol treatment on this fabric gives the good results expected for the garment applications.

Modification of Polyester Properties through Functionalization with PVA

“…Due to what has been described above, there is a need to study in more detail ways to improve their properties in order to meet the requirements imposed by the market needs. In order to make the fiber more appealing, it is necessary to development of new surface modification techniques to improving their properties [4,5].…”

“…Conventional modification of polyester fiber properties usually starts with the alkaline hydrolysis under high temperature. This alkaline treatment is carried out by adding a solution with sodium hydroxide that is responsible for changing the weight, strength, hydrophilicity, and substrate aesthetics [4][5][6][7]. The alkaline hydrolysis is the most widely used on the surface modification process for polyester fibers.…”

“…In contrast, certain functionalization's have been successfully performed through several techniques, one of them being through the incorporation of poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA) in the textile substrate. The application of this polymer on a polyester fabric is performed to modify the surface properties of the synthetic fiber to make it hydrophilic and yet improve its characteristics related to comfort [2,4,5,14,15].…”

“…Due to the advantageous properties presented by this polymer and its potential, this is still under development and is the object of study by the scientific community. The various functionalization strategies with this polymer aim to increase the hydrophilicity of the fiber's textiles such as polyester [2,4,5,14,15,17,18].…”

“…In previous works, researchers examined the effects of adding PVA in polyester fibers, and they discovered that the materials' thermal, comfort, hydrophilicity among other characteristics all changed for the better [4,5,19]. In these studies, the polyester fabric was first immersed in HCL to eliminate contaminants, and then PVA was used with different percent concentrations in alkaline medium to modify the fabric's surface.…”