Plasma treatment advantages for textiles

TL;DR

This paper reviews plasma surface treatments for textiles, highlighting their environmental benefits, surface modification capabilities, and recent developments in plasma systems for improving fabric properties.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of plasma treatment techniques and recent research results for textile surface modification, including hydrophilic and dirt-repellent coatings.

Findings

Plasma treatments can modify textile surface properties effectively.

Surface modifications are confined to the uppermost layers, preserving bulk properties.

Various plasma systems, including low-pressure and atmospheric-pressure, are discussed.

Abstract

The textile industry is searching for innovative production techniques to improve the product quality, as well as society requires new finishing techniques working in environmental respect. Plasma surface treatments show distinct advantages, because they are able to modify the surface properties of inert materials, sometimes with environment friendly devices. For fabrics, cold plasma treatments require the development of reliable and large systems. Such systems are now existing and the use of plasma physics in industrial problems is rapidly increasing. On textile surfaces, three main effects can be obtained depending on the treatment conditions: the cleaning effect, the increase of microroughness (anti-pilling finishing of wool) and the production of radicals to obtain hydrophilic surfaces. Plasma polymerisation, that is the deposition of solid polymeric materials with desired properties on textile substrates, is under development. The advantage of such plasma treatments is that the modification turns out to be restricted in the uppermost layers of the substrate, thus not affecting the overall desirable bulk properties. Here, we present the research results on the use of plasma physics in textile properties modification. Treatments on natural, wool and cotton, and on synthetic polymers to improve wetting are shown. Hydrophilic-hydrophobic treatments, dirt-repellent coatings are presented. Low-pressure and atmospheric-pressure glow discharge systems are also discussed.