engleski

Monitoring of Copper and Other Heavy Metals in Textile Processing

Monitoring of metal ions is very important and sometimes critical part of several textile processing steps. Heavy metals can be present on natural textile materials as a structural part of fibres or as impurities. In order to remove natural and other impurities from textile fabric hot alkaline solutions are used in the scouring process. If impurities are not removed, they will negatively affect subsequent bleaching, dyeing, printing or finishing operations. Different reagents are used in scouring to remove copper, iron and water hardness ions ; this results in better fabric whiteness, prevention of staining due to iron deposits and prevention of fabric damage during bleaching caused by embedded copper or iron fragments. Hydrogen peroxide, commonly used to bleach textiles, is easily decomposed in the presence of very low levels of heavy metals. Metal ions are responsible for the loss of peroxide and bleaching efficiency, and in textile applications the presence of metal particles on the fabric can cause pin holing due to the excessive rate of local decomposition of the peroxide. In this research work monitoring of copper ions and other heavy metals was done from samples of raw cotton which were imported from India and manufactured in the Croatian textile industry. Cotton samples were sampled from different processing steps, digested in the 7 M nitric acid in microwave oven and checked for the heavy metal content by ICP-OES.

copper; heavy metals; ICP OES; textile industry

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