ABSTRACT
All garments exhibit the unwanted phenomenon of wrinkling. This is most noticeable in men's suits, where the structure of the fabric and garment and the conditions under which the garment is worn facilitate wrinkle formation. Traditionally, "better" suiting materials are composed of 100% wool. However, the growth of artificial heating and the use of readily-deformed light-weight wool fabrics increased the desire for improved easy-care and non-wrinkling properties. Breaking and rearrangement of different bonds in wool such as, hydrogen, ionic, isopeptide and disulphide bonds due to immersing the fabric in hot water and/or to walking or sitting result in wrinkling of the wool fabric. The most common method to increase the wrinkling resistance of the wool fabric involves permanent setting by hot pressing and by decatising. Additional and permanent setting can be done by formation of permanent stable crosslinks between the wool chains by the use of bifunctional reagents able to bridge two functional side-groups in the wool molecules. Permanent crosslinks between the wool chains can also take place by formation of lanthionine. Treatment of wool with metal salts, such as salts of chromium, mercury to improve its wrinkling resistance has been reported[1], but due to the toxicity of such metal salts, the use of this process was stopped. The crosslinking of wool with epoxide[2] and beta- sulphato-ethylsulphone[3,4] have been also reported. In the present work, the improvement of the wrinkle recovery of wool fabric has been carried out by the use of permanent cross-linkers by using the bifunctional reactant resins, dimethyloldihydroxy ethylene urea [DMDHEU] with low formaldehyde release and N, N-dimethyl dihydroxy ethylene urea [1, 3-dimethyl 4, 5-dihydroxy 2-imidazolidinone, DHDMI] with no formaldehyde release. Different catalysts were used for completion of the crosslinking reaction and their effect on the level of finishing was studied