An advanced normal pressure plasma dyeing and finishing equipment was successfully developed after longstanding cooperation between Institute of Microelectronics of Chinese Academy of Sciences and China Textile Academy. About 30% of energy could be saved should this technology be used in the pretreatment finishing process of pad dyeing for pure cotton fabrics.

Before dyeing and printing, cotton fabrics usually must undergo desizing or scouring process to eliminate the size or other miscellanies on the fiber. In this process strong alkali must be added and substantive amount of water and vapor must be used to rinse and dry the fabric. Massive waste water with high COD is generated in this process and discharged which poses a great threat to the environment.

The pretreatment process could become entirely unnecessary or could be shortened when using the plasma technology and manufacturing cost as well as sewage water and chemical disposal could be reduced to a remarkable extent. While at the same time, dyeing and finishing performance of fiber, color fastness performance, anti-felting performance of wool fiber as well as the hand feel of fabrics and formaldehyde residue of fabrics could be substantively improved.

It is a national subject applying plasma technology in pretreatment process of cotton fabrics. Nonetheless, this technology has not been used in industry and now only be used in sample fabric process in the lab. The successful development of normal pressure plasma technology was seen as a great breakthrough in its widespread industry use and also a great leap in environmental-friendly technology.

The two institutes spent 5 years developing this technology since after 2004. After five years of diligent work, an industrialized sampling machine was successfully developed in Shaoxing.

Widespread application of plasma technology would help solve the tricky sewage disposal problem which remains a headache for over too many years. Hypothetically, if this technology was used in the over 1000 padding process manufacturing lines, about twenty million cubic water and 3 million tons of vapor could be saved, along with saving over six hundred million RMB of manufacturing cost.

Statistics indicated that textile industry energy consuming, water consuming, sewage water disposal separately takes up 4.4%, 8.5% and 10% of overall national consuming and disposal quantity. Amongst all manufacturing industries, textile sewage water disposal is the fifth largest. At the mean time, textile sewage water is extremely hard to degrade and only 10% of sewage water could be recycled.

Source: China Textile Leader