Combined wet pretreatments of cotton with enzymes

Abstract

An improvisation of enzymatic wet processing has been done by combining desizing and scouring treatment of cotton under benign conditions. The merit in this attempt lies in saving energy, time, water and importantly environment. The feasibility of this process is studied by evaluating the weight loss, absorbency and Tegewa rating. Concurrently, separate preparatory processes are also carried out and evaluated for comparison purpose. Further, to ensure the effectiveness of the combined process, peroxide bleaching of the enzyme-treated samples are carried out. The whiteness so obtained for single bath desize-scour fabrics is found to be comparable to that of separate bath processed fabrics, measured in terms of whiteness and yellowness indices. The samples later dyed also show similar results.