DECREASING THE ELECTROSTATIC CHARGE GENERATED ON THE SURFACE OF POLYMERIC TEXTILES

Abstract

The demand for environmentally friendly textiles is growing. It is well known that quality of clothes depends on their comfort, where the measure of the comfort is the friction coefficient and the intensity of electrostatic charge (ESC) generated during contact/separation and sliding on human skin and underwear. To reduce the triboelectrification of polymeric textiles, it is proposed in the present work to blend polymers textiles of negative charge such as polyester (PET) with polymers of positive charge like polyamide (PA) and wool. Besides, the blend is plain weaved by carbon fibers (CF) as well as copper wires. The proposed composites were tested by sliding under different loads against cotton textiles, where the generated ESC was measured. The results of the present experiments revealed that blending polymeric strings such as PET that gains negative ESC by that gain positive ESC like PA and wool, after sliding on cotton, reduces ESC, where blending facilitates ESC transfer from one string to the other. Besides, weaving the tested composites by CF and copper wires decreases ESC, where CF displayed the lowest ESC values. The enhancing effect increased with increasing the content of CF and copper wires. It seems that CF and copper wires facilitated the transfer of ESC from surface of negative ESC to the other of positive ESC. In the presence of wool, weaving the composites by copper wires and CF was more effective than PA. It may be from that the wool strings had fine fibers that enhanced the transfer of ESC.