Abstract
Abstract Down fibers is the most popular filling material and widely applied in daily life products such as homes, apparel and sporting gear due to its features of being natural, soft and warm keeping. The fluffiness is quite important to reflect the excellent performance of down fibers. However, owing to the short feeding cycle of poultry, the high content of immature down fibers leads to low fluffiness, which affects the quality of down fibers. In our work, the down fibers with amount of maximum raw materials and the fluffiness of 450 cm3/30 g were taken as the research samples. Clean and efficient alkaline zirconium sulfate was used as fluffing agent of down fibers. The cost of using alkalized zirconium sulfate treatment is relatively cheap compared with the traditional fluffing agent glutaraldehyde. Different doses of alkalized zirconium sulfate were used to cross-link the natural down fibers to improve the fluffiness. The results showed that when the dosage of alkalized zirconium sulfate was 2% of the weight of fibers, the performance of down fibers were the best and the fluffiness increased by 25%. It has a good practical significance to improve the economic benefits of down manufacturers. Meanwhile, the down fibers treated with alkalized zirconium sulfate were characterized by Energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS), X-ray diffractometer (XRD), Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and the changes of free amino content. Furthermore, measurement of zirconium ion concentration in wastewater by ICP showed that alkaline zirconium sulfate has achieved high absorption efficiency. Moreover, ultra depth microscope observation showed that the down fibers treated with alkalized zirconium sulfate have a better dyeing performance compared to untreated fibers. Overall, this work contributed a new insight into the sustainable development of down industry, and it further confirmed that it is a good approach to use the alkalized zirconium sulfate as the fluffing agent to improve the performance of down fibers.
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