STUDIES ON CYSTINE IN WOOL

Crabbing, well known wool setting process, often causes undesirable effects on wool fabric finishing. In order to improve these undesirable effects in setting process, we studied the application of “Cold Set” in which mercapto acid is used, To estimate the total sulfhydryl content and the adsorbency of the mercapto acid on reduced wool, suitable conditions for the phospho-18-tungstic acid method or modified method described with zahn.Results obtained are as follows.:1) Generally, under the severe conditioning and hydrolysis on reduced wool, detected values of -SH decrease. However, -SH detections in highly reduced wool which is heated at low temperature increase.2. For reduced wool, the moderate hydrolysis conditions are preferable where as for untreated wool -SH and -S-S- determination method are used. Factors for moderate condition are 20% HCl, 105°C and 3 hr.3) When untreated wool is hydrolysed in presence of free mercapto acid. A definite amount of mercapto acid disappeared.