Investigation Of Technology And Properties On The Feather Nonwovens Used For Liquid Filtration

Feather fiber is rather a big natural resourse,but not efficiently utilized in our country.This paper deals with the development of a new kind of filtration fabric,made by feather fibers and blended with thermal fibers.For efficiently filtration,the fabric is advisable to have a porous structure with proper permeability and adequate breaking strength.The feather fiber has light density,short length and no binding ability. Nonwoven technique is therfore,available.The fibers are formed to webs by air-laid method with proper thickness,needle punched,and then further strengthened by heating thermal fibers melting points to bind feather fibers.Producing for supporting the thermal fiber,bi-component of PET/CO-PET fiber is used.Physical and mechanical parameters of the fabric prepared,such as porosity,aperture,permeability,surface density, thickness of the fabric and breaking strength are measured.Three levels of main technical factors,i.e.the content of thermal fibers,times of needle punching and time of heating,are choosen for orthogonal design of experiments.By variance analyse,it has been shown that content of the thermal fibers is significant to the mean aperture,permeability and breaking strength;while the times of punching is the main factor to porosity.The number and position of thermal cohensive points affect the breaking strength,and fiber coverage of fabric decides aperture.The optimized technical factors are the content of thermal fiber 50%,3 times of needle punching and 10min of heating at temperature 110℃.Thus,the optimized fabric sample has a feather of high efficiency to filtration with the least pressure drop for fluid fitration.Being a protein fiber,feather fiber has a special capability of absorbing heavy matel as Cu²⁺,calcium & magnesium ions and dye as malachite green.Investigation to the adsorpting characteristics of the feather fabrics made on above condition is thereby endeavored.Factors affecting the adsorption ability are temperature,contact time,pH,and amount of absorbent and initial concentration of absorbate that are examined by respective experience.Results are analysed and the adsorption data validates Freundlich adsorption isotherm.For comparison, the adsorption ability of polyester fiber is also examined and reveals no adsorption ability.Consequently,it is concluded that the feather fiber can be used to make a new kind of nonwoven fabrics for filtration of liquid which was polluted by heavy metal as copper,dye as malachite green,and calcium & magnesium.The nonwoven fabric can be made to suit objective end use,with feather of efficient filtration,less pressure drop,and high adsorption ability.The fabric is also cheap and could be degradable,and little than ordinary synthetic fabric for filtration of polluted water.