Quality Improvement of Wool Fabric Using Protease Enzyme (original) (raw)
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The Journal of The Textile Institute, 2019
Wool is one of the most important fibers in textile industry, and has been commonly used for producing value added products due to its properties of lightness, warmth, softness, and smoothness. However, the special scale structure in wool cuticle can cause felting shrinkage of wool fabrics. Proteases have been widely used to modify the surface of wool to prevent wool felting, due to their ability to catalyze the hydrolysis of peptide bonds in wool scales. Although the treatment of wool with proteases was considered as an environmentally friendly technique to provide wool fabrics with shrink resistance properties, proteases exhibited low efficacy in removing the cuticle scales because of the highly cross-linked barriers. In this study, wool fabric was treated with protease enzyme obtained from novel isolated bacteria and commercial protease enzyme, and the results were compared. The tear strength, pilling changes in DE values, whiteness and yellowness values of wool were controlled. Results showed that treatment with Bacillus subtilis 168 E6-5 protease enzyme yielded improvements in the physical properties of wool fabric compared with commercial enzyme.
Effect of enzyme treatment on wool fabric properties and dimensional stability
Indian Journal of Fibre & Textile Research
In this study, the merino wool woven fabric has been treated with commercially available enzymes, i.e. transglutaminase, lipase, laccase and protease, at various concentrations (0.5-2.0% over the weight of fabric) to impart desirable shrink resistance without deterioration of the fabric properties. Protease enzyme treated wool fabric shows least area shrinkage (3.0%) followed by laccase enzyme (4.3%), lipase enzyme (4.9%) and transglutaminase enzyme (7.9%) treated fabrics, as compared to 13.3% of the untreated (blank) fabric. The specific reaction mechanism of various enzymes that cause a structural change and dimensional stability are also discussed. The tensile strength, extension-at-break, yellowness and whiteness indices of the enzyme treated fabrics are found comparable with the blank fabric, while frictional and handle properties are significantly improved. The enzyme process to impart shrink resistance to wool fabric is found sustainable, easy to scale up and due to comparable mechanical, frictional, handle, whiteness and yellowness properties, there is a potential of an industrial adaption.
Effect of enzymatic treatment on wool fabric
Environment Conservation Journal, 2019
Wool has been a precious raw material for people for a long time. Today we are able to select between a huge variety of fibres with varying properties, but the continuing use of wool-in spite of the competition with other natural fibres and new synthetic fibres can be attributed to the unique properties of wool such as good thermal regulation, high moisture absorption, low creasing tendency, low flammability and high wearing comfort. However a big disadvantage, which emerges during washing, is the felting tendency. Felting is an undesirable feature of woolen clothes which occurs as a result of the directionally dependent frictional coefficient of the wool fibers. To reduce felting, this directional dependency must be reduced. Nowadays, this is done by treating the wool in a chlorine-containing solution and due to its various advantages; the chlorination is the most frequently used process in the industry today. This process, though effective, results in the production of polluted wastewaters containing large quantities of chloro-organic compounds. Therefore, this procedure has to be replaced and develop clean technologies such as enzymatic finishing processes. Enzymes are natural protein molecules that act as highly efficient catalysts in biochemical reactions. Enzymes not only work efficiently and rapidly, but they are also biodegradable. The present study was undertaken to find the effect of Protease enzyme treatment on wool fabric and the effect of enzymatic degumming on dye ability of wool fabric. The control, scoured and enzyme treated samples were tested for various physical and colorfastness properties. Untreated wool fiber showed fair handle, no absorbency, rough and sharp scales on the surface of fiber, but after enzyme treatment wool fabric showed improvement in all the physical and colorfastness properties. With the single-step enzymatic treatment process, the scales of the wool were partially degraded and resulted in smoother surface structure which will facilitate the sliding of wool fibres in both directions and decrease felting tendency that way.