Novel delayed-cure, durable press, shrink-resist treatment of wool fabrics and garments

Abstract

The relatively high heat stability of commercial easy-care chemicals for cotton allows for greater flexibility in garment manufacturing, in particular the delayed curing of durable press, wrinkle-resistant, shrink-resist (SR) finishes on garments. Typically, the technology involves application of the wet chemical finish to the open width fabric, drying, storage, garment manufacture, heat pressing of the creases/pleats, and lastly garment baking to fully cure the durable press/crease-resistant/SR finish. By contrast, for the wool industry, there is no comparable technology, and this presents an obvious commercial weakness. The reason for this technical deficiency is that the prepolymers used for imparting machine washability and potentially durable press to wool apparel polymerise on the fabric at room temperature in storage, thereby losing their reactivity. Subsequent manufacturing into the final garment still allows the fabric to offer stability to laundering, but the loss of prepolymer reactivity precludes any potential for introducing durable creases/pleats into the garment as an integrated late-stage garment process. In this study, we present a simple solution to this technical deficiency through the use of cyclodextrin-based technology and deliver a delayed-cure, durable press, machine-washable wool technology ready for market. In any commercial textile process, the effect of chemical finishing on the final fabric colour is important. It is demonstrated in this study that the addition of HP-β-cyclodextrin into the Synthappret BAP and EC 1354 formulations has an instrumentally detectable effect on the colour of the dyed wool fabric, but that this difference is less than one colour difference (ΔECMC) unit.