Effect of Different Wool Fiber Finishing Methods on Cuticle Scales: A Review

The stratum corneum of wool is a natural barrier that prevents contact between the active groups in the fiber and the finishing agent. A large part of the wool fiber finishing is established around the stratum corneum and the broken disulfide bond. In order to deeply understand the mechanism of the finishing method for the stratum corneum and disulfide bond, which found a better method to finish wool stratum corneum scales. On this basis, the different methods of wool fiber modification from the perspective of stratum corneum are roughly classified, which can be divided into three aspects: ①The fiber scale layer was etched or peeled off; ②The scale layer is well preserved; ③The fiber scale layer was completely destroyed and extracted as keratin. At the fiber level, these finishing methods include traditional oxidation, plasma, ultraviolet radiation, biological enzyme, a more friendly emulsion coating method for wool fiber scales, and a new wool fiber finishing idea. However, these methods have obvious disadvantages when they are used alone on the fiber scale layer, but the combination of different finishing methods can improve this problem and obtain wool fabrics with better performance. At the extraction level of keratin, the most widely used redox method can obtain wool keratin with a relatively high extraction rate and molecular weight. The combination of keratin and fiber finishing can help to better solve the problem of a large accumulation of waste wool, including the deposition of protein film on the fiber and a composite material of the wool-based structure. Finally, the research direction in the future for wool fiber finishing should be to develop a composite wool fiber finishing method with strong finishing agent binding ability and maintain its own mechanical properties as much as possible and may be combined with keratin, which will promote its application.