Investigation of parameters effecting droplet size for electrospray process

Nanotechnology is a promising area for the improvement and application of the textile industry, including modifying textile materials and upgrading chemical finishes to improve dyeability, water and oil repellency, antibacterial and other properties by means of nanoparticles. In some typical textile finishing applications, the selected nanoparticles provide a larger surface area compared with traditional larger particles resulting to good interaction with the textile surface and greater performance is thus achieved. Exhaust process and impregnation are the oldest and mostly used methods of wet finishing treatments. Those methods may have important drawbacks water pollution, excessive chemical application, high energy requirement are some of those drawbacks. The basic problem in the electrospray method is the droplet size the droplet size must be minimized. The main aim of our study is to reduce the droplet size to the minimum in the electrospraying process, in the electrospray process of antibacterial, water repellent and flame retardant finishing agents; voltage, distance and solution concentration parameters are experimentally analyzed to observe the effects of these parameters on the droplet size formed in the electrospray process. The effects of the voltage, distance, and solution concentration on the droplet size were easily observed. An optical microscope was used to examine the sizes of droplets produced after electrospray, and droplet diameters were measured using an image analysis program.