PROPERTIES IMPROVEMENT ON POLYESTER FABRIC USING POLYVINYL ALCOHOL

Abstract

Polyethylene terephthalate is one of the important synthetic ester polymeric material used in widespread areas.  In textile industry, this fibrous material finds use in most of the garment and apparel applications due to its ease of handling, maintenance, and drying and competes with cotton materials.  However, due to the maximum hydrophobic behavior, this textile material gives number of issues like accumulation of statics, negligible moisture content, poor comfort and aesthetic characters.  Hence, in order to use this polyester material in the general textile industries particularly for garment and apparel productions, it is necessary to increase to some extent of its hydrophilic character by the application of some suitable chemicals like polyvinyl alcohol.  In these context, in this work an attempt is made to treat the polyethylene terephthalate fabric with sodium hydroxide followed by polyvinyl alcohol so as to increase the aesthetic properties.  The output received after the polyvinyl alcohol treatment on this fabric gives the good results expected for the garment applications.