Improvement of leather properties with lubricating polymeric surfactants

The environmental awareness, competitiveness and increase in customer demands encourage the R&D activities for the development of functional products that are more ecological and cost-effective, shorten the process duration, increase the quality of leather. In the last decade the studies on polymeric products has gained much interest to improve the leather properties. In this thesis, different lubricating polymeric materials were used in leather production for both filling and lubrication purposes for increasing the efficiency of leather processing and giving different functional properties to leather. Tensile strength of the finished leathers (TS 4119 EN ISO 3376), double edge tear load (TS 4118-2 EN ISO 3377-2), determination of extension set (TS EN ISO 17236), ball bursts (TS 4131), shrinkage temperature (IUP 16) and apparent density (TS EN ISO 2420) of leathers were tested. The data obtained from the results investigated statistically if there were significant differences between the leather physical characteristics depending on the types of lubricating polymeric materials. For the statistical analysis Wilcoxon signed ranked tests were used on IBM SPSS Statistics 25 Program. Besides, SEM images of leathers were taken. Consequently, it was deduced that the type of lubricating polymeric materials used in leather production has statistically significant effect on the different physical characteristics of the leathers. Moreover, the use of such new generation polymeric materials alone in the fatliquoring/retanning stage in the leather production is also highly promising.