Effect Of Fiber Length And Blend Ratio On The Flushable Properties Of Spunlaced Nonwovens

Wet wipes is a type of health cleaning product which is essential to people’s daily life. It’s put forward a higher requirement of post-processing problems when the widespread popularity of the wet wipes and the enhancement of people’s environmental protection requirement. We want to have a wet wipe which can not only satisfy the requirement of normal use but alsocan be directly cast into the toilet without clogging the pipes and the wastewater treatment system. Several relatively mature wet wipes could already be found in the international market but the processing technology in domestic is still in exploratory stage.Our study starts with the existing wet wipes in the market, analyze their fiber composition, fiber length and the percentage, explored the relevance between fiber length and dispersion performance. Viscose fiber with certain length and wood pulp were blended as the raw material. The flushable wet wipes were manufactured by air-laid process and waterhydro entanglement. During the process, we discussed the influence of fiber length, fiber proportion and spunlace process on the product’s performance. Finally we have a discussion on the test methods of flushable performance. Through the above research, the following conclusion has been made.Testing and analyzing Kao Merries wet wipes, Pigeon wet wipes, Kleenex wet wipes, Unicharm Moony wet wipes and Prince coiled material. Kao Merries wet wipes and Prince coiled material have best dispersibility and they both folly dispersed into single fiber. Unicharm Moony wet wipes and Pigeon wet wipes can be dispersed into numerous fragment or tangled into rope shape. The worst is Kleenex wet wipes which kept nearly intact after experiment. The results indicated that when we chose viscose and wood pulp as raw material, the length of viscose fiber should be6-11mm, the optimal content of the wood pulp is50～80%.The optimal length and content of viscose were determined. With the increase of viscose length, the CD and MD strength of wet wipes became higher and dispersion became worse. Base materialhad a higher vertically and horizontally strength and good dispersion performance when viscose length is ranged from8to11mm. When wood pulp content is within50～80%, base material will get appropriate strength and good dispersion performance.The optimum parameters of spunlace were also determined as follows. The pre-wet pressure is20bar, spunlace composite pressure is25～35bar, wet speed is4-6m/min, spunlacing distance is40-50mm, two times spunlace. In spunlaced composite process, wood pulp loss is affected by pressure, web speed, spunlaced distance and other hydro-entanglement parameters. The parameters should the controlled in right way, so that the loss of wood pulp and the burden of the water cycle system could be reduced. Cylinder turning method was found to be the optimum dispersion testing method. The size of sample,experimental water, cycle index should be considered at the same time.