Ultrasonic-Assisted Dyeing of Nylon 6 Electrospun Nanofibers

Abstract This study was carried out to address sustainability aspect of ultrasonic-assisted dyeing of nylon 6 electrospun polymeric nanofibers with reactive dyes using batchwise dyeing process specially in terms of reducing the wastewater pollution and energy. For this, nylon 6 nanofibers were prepared on an electrospinning technique and then dyed with reactive dyes by both conventional (CN) and ultrasonic (US) assisted dyeing methods. The influence of factors that may affect the dyeability of nylon 6 nanofiber with reactive dyes were simultaneously carried out using both CN and US dyeing methods. The spectrophotometric measurement of dyed samples was carried out to determine the color coordinates and color yield values. Colour yield (K/S) value up to 1.72 was achieved using US energy in dyeing nylon 6 nanofibrous mats with reactive dyes. As an additional experiment, the TDS contents of the effluent of US dyeing was reduced to 28% comparing to that of the CN dyeing, demonstrating the ecological merit of the US dyeing process. And, the potential of saving in thermal energy (up to1200 kcal), dyeing time (66.7%) and amount of reactive dye (up to 25%) were realized in US dyeing in comparison to the CN dyeing. Moreover, scanning electron microscopy and ATR-FTIR spectroscopy analysis were also carried out for this study.