Source: www.indiantextilejournal.com
Plasma technologies provide an
environmentally-friendly and versatile way of treating textile materials to enhance a variety of properties such as wettability, liquid repellency,
dyeability and coating adhesion, say Shyam Sundar P, Prabhu K H and Karthikeyan N.
Plasma technology is a surface-sensitive method that
allows selective modification in the nm-range. By introducing energy into a gas, quasi-neutral
plasma can be generated consisting of neutral particles, electrically charged particles and highly reactive radicals. If a textile to be functionalized is placed in a reaction chamber with
any gas and the plasma is then ignited, the generated particles interact with the surface of the textile. In this way the surface is specifically structured, chemically functionalized
or even coated with an nm-thin film depending on the type of gas and control of the process. There is a great demand in the textile industry for problem-free integration of
plasma processes in existing production methods.
Due to increasing requirements on the
finishing of textile fabrics, increasing use of technical textiles with synthetic fibers, as well as
the market and society demand for textiles that have been processed by
environmentally sound methods, new innovative production techniques are demanded. In
this field, the plasma technology
shows distinct advantages because
it is environment friendly, and even surface
properties of inert materials can be changed easily.
Plasma is a technology that modifies the
surfaces of textile materials paving the way for the realization of new materials and of new research zones. Particularly, it is a dry technology intrinsic ecological and
environment respectful. The plasma treatment on textile material interferes in the following aspects:
- Chemical inertia and affinity
Plasma technology can be used not only for textile finishing, but also for the optimization of
textile machines for example
with hard coatings.
It has been known for at least 60 years that
plasma could effect desirable changes in the surface properties of materials.
However, the practical application of plasma requires the development of
commercially available, reliable, and large plasma systems. Such systems are
now available (mostly in research laboratories) and the application of plasma
to industrial problems has been increasing rapidly for the past 10 years(l).
What is Plasma?
Plasma is an ionised gas. When a gas is heated enough that the atoms collide with each other and knock their electrons off in the process, plasma is formed: the so-called 'fourth state of matter'. Instead of a hot gas composed of electrically neutral atoms; we have two commingled populations composed
of oppositely chi: electrons and ionised nuclei.
