Waterless bleaching and scouring of cotton using supercritical carbon dioxide fluid technology

This thesis aims to realize waterless scouring and bleaching of cotton in supercritical carbondioxide (scCO2) medium in order to support environmentally friendly and sustainable textile finishing. The proposed approach namely waterless scouring and bleaching of cotton fiber in supercritical carbondioxide (scCO2) medium is a novel approach and has not been reported before in the surveyed literatue. Cotton is the most widely produced and used natural fiber with a popular use in Turkish textile industry. Considerable amounts of water is used during cotton fiber pre-treatment. Conventional pre-treatment steps include a desizing step followed by scouring and bleaching steps. In this thesis, reference (control) treatments will be the conventional scouring (hydrophilizing) and bleaching processes. The tested treatments will be scouring (hydrophilizing) and bleaching of cotton with supercritical carbondioxide (scCO2) fluid technology. The initial pressure, temperature and times were determined according to the literature and several optimization trials by changing time, temperature, concentration and additives and related auxiliaries are planned.