Plasma Treatment of Cotton Nonwovens

Due to the limitations of chemical finishing of cotton nonwovens, there was a need for a better technology which can overcome these limitations. Plasma technology has been introduced to the world in 1960s, but in later years this environmental friendly and cost effective plasma technology has been brought into the textile industry to surpass the cons of other finishing methods and to produce better treatment results. Plasma technology can be applied both at vacuum and atmospheric pressure levels. The atmospheric pressure plasma technology can be used for continuous processing of the cotton nonwovens also.

With these latest technologies, the cotton nonwovens can be functionalized to achieve different required characteristics such as wettability, hydrophobicity, breathability adhesion property and other functionalizable properties. In this paper, we are going to characterize the double needlepunched cotton nonwoven materials of different weights treated through the advanced atmospheric pressure plasma technology at different exposure levels and observe the effects of the treatment on the fabric by using various analytical techniques such as contact angle measurement, tensile strength and breaking strength evaluation and other structural and mechanical properties measurement. These can be further evidenced by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) imaging and atomic force microscopy (AFM) imaging to observe the effects upto nanolevel changes on the surface of the material.        

All these modifications to the double needlepunched cotton nonwoven materials will extensively allow them more widely applied over the versatile fields such as applications in automobiles, medical and hygiene product applications, applications in filtration industry etc.

Key words: Plasma treatment, needlepunched cotton nonwovens, functionalization.