Human health impact of multifunctional textiles obtained by using plasma technology

Abstract

This paper presents aspects regarding human health impact that could have functionalized textile by using plasma nanotechnology. The usage of plasma for textile pretreatment is done for removing the natural impurities and oil residues, which are added during woven structure manufacturing process, and for improving material wettability which is necessary for dyeing, printing, hydrophobization or deposition of medical substances. The textile surface preparations by using plasma nanotechnology is a clean and safety process and improve the washing cycles because by using plasma activation the substance used for treatment is fixed deeper in the textile structure. For preparation of textile structure by using traditional finishing method it is occurring the problem of the residues from wet finishing process which harmful for environment. For example for cotton fiber, conventional wet pretreatment processes include scouring, bleaching and mercerization [1]. These pretreatments remove impurities such as pectin, wax and oil, cotton seed residues, sizing materials [1]. The pretreatment processes require a long treatment time, more chemicals and high treatment temperature, resulting in low production efficiency, high energy consumption and heavy loading in effluent [1]. By using plasma treatment we can obtain chemicals economy, reducing the time necessary for finishing process and the harmful substances. The treatment which could follow to low temperature plasma treatment it is mild and can improve the antimicrobial fabric properties by pretreating the material with colloidal silver or chitosan solutions. The chemical treatment used on textile surfaces functionalized in plasma is energy-saving pretreatment processes. For our work we obtain cotton fabric functionalization by using oxygen plasma treatment for 10 minutes. After this time limit, we observe that the cotton fibers is in accelerated aging process, practically from 20 minutes to 90 minutes plasma treatment the cotton suffer a depolymerization which affect the textile structure resistances (traction, abrasion) [2]. In the case of polyester fabric we observed a good functionalization of the structure after 20 minutes plasma treatment, but after this limit to the interval of 90 minutes plasma treatment the polyester knows an accelerated polymerization [2].