Scalable coating process of AgNPs-silicone on cotton fabric for developing hydrophobic and antimicrobial properties

Abstract

Developing a scalable and cost-effective coating process is critical to manufacturing cotton-based hydrophobic antimicrobial fabric for various commercial applications. This paper describes a scalable, cost-effective coating process that is compatible with the existing industrial finishing processes of fabrics. In this process, the fabric is continuously dipped in water-based silver salt and the reducing agent solution to impart silver particles on the fiber surface to produce different coated samples. The process is tuned to minimize process cost and material cost and maximize the antimicrobial effectiveness and durability of the fabric. This paper also introduces an easy protective coating technique with silicone binder of the antimicrobial fabric that improves the durability and hydrophobicity of the antimicrobial fabric without sacrificing the comfort properties of textile fabrics. In the presence of silicone binder, the samples show significant antibacterial effectiveness against two microorganisms, gram-positive Staphylococcus aureus and gram-negative Escherichia coli bacteria. Qualitative assessment is carried out to evaluate the antimicrobial properties of the silicone encapsulated silver particles-coated fabrics. Moreover, among the silver-coated fabrics of different cycles, silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) are deposited in the 1 cycle of silver-coated fabric and the average particle size deposited onto the fiber surface is 65.52 ± 2.71 nm. After silicone encapsulation, among all encapsulated samples, 1 cycle of silver-coated silicone encapsulated sample shows the best result in terms of antimicrobial efficacy where silicone encapsulated 1 cycle silver-coated sample shows around the zone of inhibition 0.53 and 0.25 mm and encapsulated 2 cycles silver-coated sample shows the zone of inhibition 0.14 and 0.06 mm for S. aureus and E. coli, respectively. Coated fabrics with and without silicone encapsulation are characterized by scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy.