Lipid interaction with textile fibres in dyeing conditions

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in the textile industry in eco-friendly textile processing, in which the use of naturally occurring materials such as phospholipids becomes important. In previous work [1] we have studied the effect of microencapsulation of dyes with soybean lecithin liposomes, in the dyeing of polyamide and cotton. We also found that, even if the dye was not encapsulated, there is an effect on the dyeing rate due to the lipid itself. In order to understand this effect we studied the interactions between phospholipids (labelled and non-labelled) with the fibres. We used a combination of reflectance, fluorescence, FTIR spectroscopy and electronic microscopy characterisation techniques. Our main conclusion is that phosphatidylcholine has more affinity for polyamide than for cotton and that cotton seems to interact more strongly with phosphatidylinositol.

Acknowledgements We wish to thanks to Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal) for the scholarship (BD/ 17186/ 98) of A.L.F.B.