Sustainable dyeing of cotton fabric with reactive dye in silicone oil emulsion for improving dye uptake and reducing wastewater

From sustainable chemistry and engineering perspectives, water and energy consumption are arguably the main issues in the textile industry. Thus, a silicone reverse emulsion dyeing system is developed to dye cellulosic textile with reactive dye. When the amount of dye is the same, the color depth of dyed cotton fiber is 13.82 and the fixation of dye is 87.76% in the silicone reverse emulsion dyeing system. In traditional water-based dyeing system, the color depth of dyed cotton fiber and the fixation of dye is only 9.31, 56.63% respectively. The silicone reverse emulsion dyeing technology does not consumes salts, but it can improve the dye fixation by 31.13%, and decreases the dye discharge by 72.41%. For the hydrolysis of bifunctional reactive dye, the main hydrolysis reaction is the individual hydrolysis of monochlorotriazine or vinyl sulfone at the prophase of hydrolysis. After 30 min, the additional β-hydroxyethyl sulfone and hydroxyl triazine dye are hydrolyzed to dihydroxyl dye. To confirm the hydrolytic reaction energy of dye in different dyeing system, the optimization of molecular structure, the hydrolysis reaction gap and the distribution of electron density on the dye were investigated using density functional theory. The hydrolytic reaction energy gap of bifunctional reactive dye is higher in silicone reverse emulsion dyeing system than that in traditional aqueous dyeing system, resulting the hydrolysis of dye is difficult in silicone oil emulsion dyeing system. The electron density is distributed almost entirely on the carbon–carbon double bond and triazine group in the HOMO of the dye, resulting in the LUMO of dyes can attacked by HOMO of hydroxyl anion. These successful investigations of the dyeing performance and the hydrolysis mechanism of dye explain that reactive dye can keep a long reactivity to fiber and effectively reduce the number of washing times, which greatly reduces the discharge of dyeing waste water.