New Advances in Plasma Technology for Textile

Abstract

Plasma processing technologies are of vital importance to several of the largest manufacturing industries in the world. Foremost among these industries is the electronics industry, in which plasma-based processes are indispensable for the manufacture of very large-scale integrated microelectronic circuits. Plasma processing of materials is also a critical technology in, for example, the aerospace, automotive, steel, biomedical, and toxic waste management industries. Most recently, plasma processing technology has been utilized increasingly in the emerging technologies of diamond film and superconducting film growth. The dominant role of plasma-treated surfaces in key industrial sectors, such as microelectronics, is well known, and plasmas, certainly experimentally and, in places, industrially, are being used to modify a huge range of material surfaces, including plastics, polymers and resins, paper and board, metals, ceramics and in organics, and biomaterials. In the textile field, significant research work has been going on since the early 1980s in many laboratories across the world dealing with low temperature plasma treatments of a variety of fibrous materials showing very promising results regarding the improvements in various functional properties in plasma-treated textiles. The growing environmental and energy-saving concerns will also lead to the gradual replacement of many traditional wet chemistry-based textile processing, using large amounts of water, energy and effluents, by various forms of low-liquor and dry-finishing processes. Plasma technology, when developed at a commercially viable level, has strong potential to offer in an attractive way achievement of new functionalities in textiles. The objective of this work is to give a comprehensive description and review of the science and technology related to plasmas, with particular emphasis on their potential use in the textile industry.