Study On Bioscouring Of Cotton Knitted Fabrics With Complex Enzymes

Cutinase is an enzyme of hydrolyzing plant cuticle and it can also hydrolysis other fatty acid ester and triglyceride. But the capability for hydrolyzing polyester is better for cutinase. As a multifunctional enzyme, cutinase usually used in biocatalysis, detergents, food industry and degradation of synthetic plastics.The textile industry has become a new field for the application of cutinase in recent years.In this paper cotton knitted fabrics were scoured by cutinase, pectinase and cutinase /pectinase, respectively. The scouring effects were investigated in terms of removal percentage of pectins, removal percentage of cotton waxes, tensile strength and wetting ability of the treated fabrics. We studied the catalytic role of cutinase in the pectinase scouring. The results showed that cutinase can improve the wetting ability of cotton knitted fabric, particularly containing a hot water pretreatment before treatment, the wetting ability was markedly improved. The non-ionic surfactants can improve the scouring effects of cutinases.The factors such as cutinase concentration, treatment time, pH and pretreatment conditions were studied through single factor circulation experiments.The scouring results using cutinase and pectinase complex showed that cutinase has very poor ability in remaoving pectins. The pectin removal percentage using complex enzymes was higher than pectinase alone.The complex enzymes significantly improved the wetting ability of cotton knitted fabrics Cutin may be the main reason affecting the wetting ability of cotton fiber.The com- ponents of cotton wax which was removed by cutinase and pectinase may be different.Cutinase can hydrolysis cutin and other hydrophobic esters, but pectinase can just remove the cotton wax that is attached to the pectin.The effect of this part cotton wax is inferior to the wax removed by cutinase.So the wetting ability of cotton frabic treated by cutinase is better than pectinase.