The project aims a new treatment based on modification of cotton fibre for improving the dye-ability of cellulosic fabric with the reactive dye and reducing effluent discharge. The project is focused to examine the performance of enzyme and its coloring ability using reactive dyes. The overall test results of colorfastness values showed excellent ratings except a significant drop in light fastness and moderate increase in CIELAB and K/S values for enzymatic colored sample compared to the conventional colored sample. The effluent load of enzymatic colored sample is significantly reduced compared to the conventional colored sample. The project enhances the possibility of using enzyme as an alternative source for the salt in coloring the cotton fabrics.


Introduction


Many studies have been devoted for improving the substantivity of cotton for reactive dyes, thus diminishing or eliminating the amount of electrolyte required and increasing the efficiency of the dye fiber reaction. However, none to the date has achieved significant commercial success, since all suffer from one or more disadvantages, such as significantly reduced light fastness,unsatisfactory dye fixation efficiency or poor wet fastness, marked change inhue, limited suitability of the treatment for different kinds of reactive dyes,unpleasant odors released during application and ring dyeing. The objective of our study is to develop a new technique that minimizes the problems cited above.


In the last few years various patents were reported on coloration of protein fibre a using laccase .However, dyeing of cellulose fabrics has not been reported so far, except for a patent application that claims in general the dyeing of the whole range of natural and synthetic fibers without specific examples for cellulose fibers. The main difficulty consists in the lack of substantivity of the enzymatically generated dyes towards the cellulose substrate. Hence this research offered to develop a cellulase mediated dyeing process for cotton fabric.


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The guide for this article is Mr. M. Parthiban, Lecturer in PSG College of Technology