Organic Wool Fiber And Alkali Solution Method Refinement

Slenderizing wool fiber by alkaline organic solution was studied in this paper.In order to solve the problem that alkaline agent can infiltrate into the inner part of wool fiber,KOH was used as alkaline agent and n-butanol was used as solvent instead of water. Thus,the expansion of fiber will decrease and the gaps among fibers will deflate. Consequently,the infiltration of alkaline agent will be slower than the reaction rate,and the inner part of wool fiber will not be damaged.Combining with the structure,chemical composition and properties of wool fiber, the action mechanism of slenderizing methods with alkali was introduced.The alkaline organic solution slenderizing process for wool fiber was investigated with quadratic regression rotation composite design and a mathematical model was set up of the fineness, breaking strength and breaking elongation related to the three major factors of the concentration of the KOH n-butanol solution,treatment time and the concentration of the penetrating agent.The optimum process parameters were obtained with the method of decision of multi-objective gray situation.The verification test also indicated the optimum process is right.The results show that the best slenderizing was achieved when the concentration of the KOH n-butanol solution was 7.2%,treatment time 7.7h,and the concentration of the penetrating agent 0.13%.Under the optimum process conditions,the scales are almost completely removed from wool fibers.The surface of the wool fibers is relatively smooth. And the main body of the wool fibers remains undamaged.The diameter decreases obviously;the breaking strength retention is high;and the elongation at break is slightly increased after the treatment.Now,research and application of slenderizing wool fibers by alkaline organic solution are still in primary and explorative stage.This topic can make the research and application of this method go further and more extendedly.