Journal of Textile Science & Engineering

Conventionally, dyeing of cotton with reactive dye can be done in the presence of salt to improve exhaustion by reduction the repletion forces in between the anionic dye and hydroxyl functional groups of cotton. But after dyeing salt and hydrolysed reactive dye effluent becomes directly disposed to the environment and critically affect human health and biodiversity live inside water bodies. To eliminate salt consumption and enhance wool waste utilization, the present study focused on an eco-friendly approach of salt free dyeing of cotton with reactive through cationization using extracted keratin hydrolysed from Ethiopian sheep wool waste. Keratin protein was successfully extracted from wool waste using different combinations of NaOH Concentration, Temperature, pH and Time. The optimum extraction parameters were selected by investigating the maximum absorption obtained at λ max under UV/Vis Spectrophotometer. The dyeing efficiency of keratin treated cotton was compared with untreated cotton. The dye bath exhaustion percentage for cationized by pad-dry, pad –dry-cur and untreated cotton fabric was evaluated using UV/Vis spectrophotometer and recorded as 70 %, 63.3% and 56.6% respectively. The chemical composition of the cationized fabric was investigated under FTIR. The color strength (K/S), CIE L*a*b* was examined under Color eye - 300 spectrophotometer and the cationized fabric shows better K/S value as compared with untreated fabric. The color fastness for both cationized and untreated dyed fabrics also evaluated and investigated using international standards. The cationized cotton fabric shows very good-excellent color fastness property which is better than that of untreated fabric.