Study On The Identification Methods Of Fur Fibers

With the improvement of people’s living standards, people tend to purchase luxurious animal fur clothes. China is the world center of fur manufacture and consumption, because she has various kinds of wildlife. However, counterfeits and some low-quality fur clothes are full of the market due to the wicked merchants driven by fat benefits. Unfortunately, normal consumers cannot distinguish real fur and fake ones. In addition, some conventional inspection methods are inapplicable and ineffective and new testing standard of fur products is lacked. Therefore, building testing standard is urgent.We gather six kinds of fur fibers which include south raccoon, north raccoon, mink, blue fox, red fox and silver fox. These furs are very popular in the fur market of china. In this paper, a comprehensive testing is carried out by using conventional inspection methods. And men, the near infrared test method is proposed to observe the differences of these fur fibers. The details are as follows:Firstly, we analyze the Macro morphological characteristics, mechanical properties (except mink fur fibers due to its short) and crimp properties (except mink fur fibers) are tested by the handle-visual method, tensile strength tester, crimp performance tester. However, these features may disappear after physical or chemical treatment, so they cannot be the inspection criterion. Although fur fibers are identified according to the scales type and sequence of fibers by applying SEM which is the most commonly used method. However, the types of the scales are various, the experiences of the SEM inspectors are very important. As a result, the SEM inspection is subjective judgment. Therefore, the identification of animal fur fibers needs more objective evaluation.Secondly, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), IR spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, TG-FTIR and inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectrometer (ICP-AES) are used for testing and analyzing physical and chemical properties of these six kinds of fur fibers. The results demonstrate that:DSC can only distinguish south raccoon, north raccoon, mink, blue fox, from red fox, silver fox. As the main component of the six fur fibers are keratin, the IR spectra, TG and XRD curves of these fur fibers are high similar, so the fibers can not be identified. The color and heavy metal content of animal fibers solution are difference of these6kinds of fur fibers with the method of ICP-AES trace elemental analysis. But the same kind of samples may show different results under the same experiment condition, which requires further study.Thirdly, Near infrared spectra method is used by investigating these fur fibers. Collecting representative and typical samples, the spectra of the fibers are scanned under the same conditions. The model is obtained after cluster analysis (by employing Euclidean distance) of pretreated infrared spectra. Then the model is verified. The results demonstrate that the infrared spectra model is accuracy and can be used to identify the six kinds of fur fibers quickly, precisely and undamaged.