Surface treated cotton fabric with stain repellent property for the use in aircraft upholstery

Nanotechnology modifications play a major role in textile industry due to extraordinary properties exhibit in fabrics due to nanomaterials. It offers different functionalities namely self-cleaning, wrinkle resistance, flame retardancy, protection from UV radiations or antibacterial property. Further, it is important to maintain cleanliness in aircraft upholstery always but the airliners have to bear a considerable amount of money to clean up the aircraft upholstery. Interestingly, nanotechnology can provide stain repellence property for fabrics in aircraft upholstery. This study covers a method of developing a stain repellent fabric which was stable even after 25 standard laundering conditions. In this study nanotechnology was used to modify a cotton fabric with stain repellant property. After nanotechnology modification, the surface wettability of the treated fabrics was characterized by static water contact angle measurements before and after 25 washes carried out under standard laundering conditions. Similar testings were carried out for the untreated fabric samples. The static water contact angle for the treated fabric was 161° with the recovery of 97.5% after 25 washing cycles. SEM and AFM micrographs were used to analyze the coatings. Further, the stability of hydrophobicity in the modified cotton fabric after 25 washes was also tested for tea, coffee, and water solutions which are vulnerable stain types in aircraft upholstery. It clearly proved that the modified cotton fabric even after 25 washes showed hydrophobicity for tea, coffee, and water. Therefore, it could be concluded that the developed modified cotton fabric can consider to be used as an aircraft upholstery.