Home care of dry cleaning labeled products

Textiles are the integral parts of our daily lives. Clothes which we wear all day, need to be maintained for the next usage. Every textile product need to be cared according to their features like its fiber, form, accesories and other specialities. Due to this reason, there are care labels on garments with the purpose of accurate maintenance. Sometimes, there could be 'dry clean only' expression on the care labels. Generally, these labels belong to the clothes which might be affected by water adversely. They become more sensetive to abrasion when they absorb water. Water is not used in dry cleaning. In the cleaning phase of dry cleaning, generally perchloroethylene is used as main washing medium. There are three main phases of dry cleaning. These stages are, pretreatment (stain removal), cleaning and ironing. Especially, if the garment has a stain, a pretreatment process is required before the dry cleaning operation. One or more chemicals might be used for the pretreatment process. However, perchloroethylene is a solvent which is harmful for human health. Therefore, some other alternative cleaning methods are developed to solve this problem. One of these methods is wet cleaning. In wet cleaning process, water is used as medium instead of the solvent. Some chemicals are added in water for preventing shrinkage, felting and other damages that arise from water. Moreover this process is done by computer controlled machines which make sensetive movements. In the light of this information, studies were conducted on home care of garments that have 'dry clean only' care label. Determining the requirements of suitable treatment of delicate clothes in domestic machines was intended. It was aimed to maintain the textile products' form, remove the wrinkles and odors by using this domestic treatment. These studies can be devided in three parts. These are, the preliminary studies, analysis of the domestic products with similar objectives and the main study. In preliminary studies, 11 kg washing machine and 7 kg heat pump drying machine were used. In washing machine, some detergents were examinated by using a gentle washing programme. In drying machine some home dry cleaning kits and different drying styles with different conditions were tested. At the end of these studies, the drying machine was determined to be more effective in terms of protection against deterioration of the garment forms and the rest of the studies were performed in the drying machine. In these studies, it revealed that the steam is an effective parameter for removing wrinkles. Moreover, it was determined that, also stretching is a significant factor for wrinkle removal. A product which is designed for a single cloth and a cabinet type product were examinated in the scope of the analysis of other products. A garment is stretching with latches and treated with a chemical during 10 minutes for wrinkle removal and giving fragrance in the single garment type product. The cabinet type product is a device which works with a heat pump system and has refreshment, wrinkle removal, hygiene and drying functions. Loading capacity of the product is 5 kgs. Refreshment is performed by a steam unit of the device. This process includes elimination of odor molecules. Also, wrinkle removal process is done by steam. Moreover, hygiene is provided by eliminating bacteria due to the steam and hot air. In the main study section, a design of experiment is created by using the outputs of preliminary studies. Design parameters were steam duration, steam flow rate and textile placement in the tumble dryer. The resulting set of experiments were done with 100% silk shirt and 100% linen shirt, individually. Experimentals were carried out in 7 kg heat pump tumble drier. Odor removal percentage, wrinkle recovery and dimentional change are the outputs of experiments. Odor removal performance was evaluated both subjectively and objectively. Subjective evaluation was performed by panelists. They compared treated samples with referances and numerate them according to their odor intensity. After the programme optimization, odor removal performance of determined programme was done objectively. GC-MS was used for the objective measurement of odor removal percentage. AATCC appearance of fabrics after repeated home laundering replicas were used for wrinkle evaluation. Residual wrinkle amount of threated shirts were scored according to this replicas. Dimentional changes were determined by measuring length and width of the shirts before and after the tumble drier process. No significant dimentional change was determined. Minitab 17 was used for analysis of experimental results. According to the analysis, it was determined that the most effective parameter is textile placement for wrinkle removal, for both silk and linen. Afterwards the analysis, optimization studies were conducted for determining the optimum process parameters. In the end of the optimisation, two optimum algorithms were determined one each for silk and linen shirts. For silk, 18 minutes steam duration, 19.7 g/min steam flow rate and stretching; for linen, 18 minutes steam duration, 25.5 g/min steam flow rate and free settlement conditions were optimum. Similar odor removal performance results were obtained when optimum test results were compared with other commercial products. While commercial product removes %90 of odor, optimum condition removes %88.3 of odor. Furthermore, wrinkle removing performance of optimum conditions were better than this commercial products. While the wrinkle score of the shirts which processed with determined condion were 4.2, the score of commercial product was 3. The energy consumption and time duration of the determined optimum programmes with subsequent ironing and convantional washing, tumble drying, ironing processes were compared. It was shown that processing with optimum programmes shorthened the ironing time. Besides, energy consumptions of the optimized conditions were signally decreased. 79 minutes were spent for washing, tumble drying and ironing silk shirts, although 23,5 minutes were spent for determined programme on tumble dryer and ironing of silk shirts. Energy consumptions were 0.526 kWh and 0.245 kWh respectively. Washing, tumble drying and ironing took 78 minutes for linen shirt and process of optimum programme and ironing continued 24 minutes. For the process including washing, tumble drying and ironing consumed 0.637 kWh, determined optimum programme and ironing spent 0.299 kWh energy. During the experimentals, wrinkles were made artificially at specified locations. After determining the optimum processing conditions, this conditions were tested with natural wrinkles of one day worn silk and linen shirts. The results of natural wrinkle specimens coincided with artificial wrinkled specimens. According to this comparison, natural wrinkled specimens had same recovery results for linen shirt. Besides, recovery results of silk shirts were better than artificial ones. Because for silk specimens daily wrinkles were smoother than the linens.