Foam Finishing Treatment of Cotton Fabrics with Formaldehyde Part I: Textile Physical Properties1

Abstract

A fractional factorial design of experiments was used in studying the treatment of cotton printcloth with formaldehyde. Foam application of the HCHO with Zn(NO3)2 catalysis was used at wet pickups up to 40%. Multiple stepwise regression analysis of the textile property data indicated that only combinations of processing variables were responsible for a substantial portion of the predicted increases in resilience and the decreases in strength and abrasion performance. The analysis also substantiated the satisfactory agreement between predicted and measured resilience and strength values and the moderate to poor agreement between predicted and measured abrasion values.