Reclaiming spent liquor from cotton reactive dyebaths using nanofiltration membrane for possible reuse of water and salt

During dyeing, salts are placed in a dyebath to aid the fixation of various dyes on to the fabric while bases are added to raise the pH from around neutral to pH 11. Afterwards, the used dyebath solution, called dyebath spent liquor, is discharged with almost all the salts and bases added as well as unfixed dyes. Consequently, a lot of raw materials are lost in the waste stream ending up in the environment as pollutants. In this study, possibilities of reusing water and salts of dyebathes were investigated, using a nanofiltration membrane. When the salt concentration in the spent liquor was increased from 10 to 80 g/L, the salt rejection by membrane was found to decrease initially; however, the salt rejection increased over the time, which was not expected. The aggregation of dye was also studied and found to decrease in the concentrate when the salt concentration was increased. This may be due to the aggregation of salt in the concentrate, which explains the increase in salt rejection. This information is useful for the textile industry in evaluating the treated water quality for the purpose of reuse.

Embeddable and locatable spinning

A novel spinning method: embeddable and locatable spinning, is reported for the first time in this paper. Analysis of the key restrictions of the conventional and some novel ring-spinning were studied; evolvement and principles of embeddable and locatable spinning were then introduced. Analysis indicated that embeddable and locatable spinning could overcome the existing restrictions of ring spinning and improve the spinning performance of fiber strands as well as the quality of the resulting yarn. Super-fine and colorful figured yarns could be produced successfully, and most fibers shorter than can be spun in traditional spinning could be well embedded into a yarn by embeddable and locatable spinning method; even staple fibers of low qualities could be used to produce a fine yarn of high qualities in the novel spinning system. This novel spinning method shows huge application potentials in textile industry by improving the yarn quality, developing super-fine yarn, and increasing fiber utilization rate.

Intelligent clothing for automated recognition of human physical activities in free-living environment

This paper presents an intelligent clothing framework for human daily activity recognition using a single waist-worn tri-axial accelerometer sensor coupled with a robust pattern recognition system. The activity recognition algorithm is realized to distinguish six different physical activities through three major steps: acceleration signal collection/pre-processing, wavelet-based principle component analysis, and a support vector machine classifier. The proposed activity recognition method has been experimentally validated through two batches of trials with an overall mean classification accuracy of 95.25 and 94.87%, respectively. These results suggest that the intelligent clothing is not only able to learn the activity patterns but also capable of generalizing new data from both known and unknown subjects. This enables the proposed intelligent clothing to be applied in a comfortable and in situ assessment of human physical activities, which would open up new market segments to the textile industry.

Degradation of organic dyes by P25-reduced graphene oxide: influence of inorganic salts and surfactants

Treatment of coloured effluent treatment is a major issue for the textile industry. In this study, catalyst P25-graphene was prepared and applied for degrading dye from an aqueous solution. Three types of dyes were selected to determine the feasibility of the catalyst for the dye degradation, including sulphonic, azoic, and fluorescent dyes. P25-graphene catalyst showed good ability to degrade all selected dyes. The influence of inorganic salts and surfactants on the photocatalytic degradation of rhodamine B using catalyst P25-graphene was also investigated. The degradation of rhodamine B was suppressed by the presence of NaCl, but the effect of Na2SO4 was negligible. The degradation of rhodamine B was significantly suppressed by all three types of surfactant, namely anionic, cationic and non-ionic surfactants. NMR technique was used to investigate the mechanisms associated with this suppression.

Functionality of nano titanium dioxide on textiles with future aspects: focus on wool

The consumption of titanium dioxide in today's world is on the increase. As the most popular nano substance, TiO 2 is used in various industries notably in the textile industry. More and more recently, through a synergistic combination of photocatalytic features of nanoparticles, fabrics with novel properties are produced. Self-cleaning and stability against UV rays as well as chemical media, to name but a few, are among new prominent properties, obtained on textiles. A common subject reported in most studies has been the diverse approaches to immobilize the nanoparticles on the surface of fabrics. Wool is among common textile materials that have undergone numerous processes to be modified. This review intends to bring to light different aspects of application of nano titanium dioxide in the textile industry especially on wool, and also presents a concise overview on the rigorous pieces of research conducted in this realm.

Incorporating sustainability in textile effluent treatment facilities

Sustainable development encompasses environmental, social and
economic considerations. As such the stakeholders include industry, government, individuals and communities. When designing or operating an industrial plant, it is Insufficient to consider only the economic viability of the facility. This paper examines the background to current sustainability awareness and presents a case study that incorporates sustainability principles in the design of an efluent treatment plant for a textile plant. The likely design of the treatment system (electro flotation followed by filtration) will do more than just meet regulatory requirements, it will maximise possible reuse of water and so minimise environmental impact of the facility.