Influence Of Distilled Water, Sodium Hydroxide, Ammonia And Acetic Acid On Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Jet Treatment Of Ultrahigh-modulus Polyethylene Fibers

Textile industry is one of the industries which severely pollute our environment and largely consume energy and water. The status shows that about 900 millions tons of waste water is exhausted every year in textile industry.For wastewater in dyeing and printing,it has some characteristics of difficulty to decoloring and containing organic matter with high concentration.Therefore,the sustainable development of textile industry heavily depends on the wastewater problem can be solved.In order to deal with the problems,the processing route of dyeing,printing and finishing needs to be improved.Plasma treatment is a gaseous technology in which physical method is combined with chemical method.Compared with traditional physical and chemical treatments,it has some advantages of low pollution,low energy consumption,without involving water and chemicals.Especially in low temperature plasma,the electrons with high energy and other excited or ionized particles initiate physical and chemical reaction only on the surface of substrate with the thickness of several nanometers. However,the lower gas temperature has no effect on the bulk property.Therefore,the low temperature plasma treatment can be used to modify polymer surface.With the increasing ecologic and economic limits to textile industry,as an environmental friendly surface modification technology,plasma treatment has been widely used in polymer surface modification,which is effective and applicable.Previously most plasma treatments were done at low pressure,which can not realize on-line process due to expensive vacuum system.However,the recently developed non-equilibrium low temperature surface treatment at atmospheric pressure can be directly added into process line.Predecessors had found that small molecule such as water absorbed in the fiber or in the environment and ethanol would influence the effect plasma treatment of fibers:It was exhibited that the ethanol could efficiently and greatly quench the treatment effect,while it made just a fewer influence when it was applied after the treatment.Water absorbed in the fiber would improve the adhesion property with resin;the water in the environment would improve the etching effect and contact angle. So it can be concluded the existence of small molecule can not be ignored.Distill water,acetic acid,ammonia and sodium hydroxide are widely used in textile and finishing industries. The research to find the influence on plasma treatment by them is important.Two experiments were included in this paper.Experiment one:ultra-high modulus polyethylene(UHMPE) fibers were emerged in distilled water and treated by atmospheric plasma treatment immediately compared with directly treated. Experiment two:ultra-high modulus polyethylene(UHMPE) fibers were emerged in 3%acetic acid,3%ammonia and 10g/L sodium hydroxide individually for 24h,dried in shade for 12h, were treated by atmospheric pressure plasma jet treatment (APPJ).The results showed that in the first experiment distilled water on the fiber surface could quench the plasma effect on the adhesion property with resin but improve the contact angle.In the result of second experiment showed that atmospheric plasma treatment contributed etching effect on the surface of UHMPE, surface of the group which emerged in sodium hydroxide was rougher due to sodium hydroxide recrystallization on the surface. Oxygen and polar groups were all increased.The wettability and cohesion property between the fiber and the epoxy resin were all improved greatly.There is no significant difference between samples emerged in different solvent.