A comparison between acrilic resin and butanetetracarboxylic acid used to bind TiO₂ nanoparticles to cotton fabrics

In order to apply finishing particles onto fabrics, several methods such as, padding, bath exhaustion, spraying and foaming can be used. In this research, spray treatment is compared to padding when applying TiO₂ nanoparticles onto textiles. Cotton fabric surfaces were observed by scanning electron microscopy and characterized by Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy and energy dispersive using X-ray (EDX). EDX technique showed that it was a suitable method to detect the presence of Ti particles on the fabric surface. We confirm that the fabric treated by padding contained procedure a higher quantity of Ti particles than the one treated by spraying. On the other hand, we compared two different auxiliary products to bind the particles onto the fibers, an acrylic resin and the polycarboxylic acid 1,2,3,4-butanetetracarboxylic acid (BTCA) in the presence of sodium hypophosphite. We used EDX to evaluate the effectiveness of both binders after washing. Compared with samples without a binder treatment, many more TiO₂ particles were retained on the fibers with the acrylic resin after five washing cycles. When treated with BTCA, however, the results were comparable to the sample with no binder.