Eco-Friendly Technology for Reactive Dyeing of Cationized Fabrics: Protic Ionic Liquids as Innovative Media

Abstract

Because of the limitations of traditional dyeing technologies, large amounts of water and chemical additives are used in the dyeing processes, resulting in enormous quantities of polluted wastewater, which has a huge health and environmental potential impact. In the last few years, the interest in researching alternative techniques/materials for the textile industry to reduce the consumption of water used to improve dyeing quality, has considerably increased. Continuing previous research, in this paper, we present a non-aqueous dyeing procedure, testing different types of fabrics with a polyfunctional reactive dye and protic ionic liquids (PILs) as reaction environment, and with cationization pretreatment of the tested fibers. To analyze the effectiveness of the proposed procedure, currently established dyeing quality parameters, such as color absorption and wash fastness of the dyed multifiber fabrics, have been measured and analysed. The obtained dyeing results should be explained by the affinity of cationized multifibers to the reactive dye, as well as by the efficiency of the mechanisms of dye diffusion and chemical bonding on the tested fabrics in protic ionic liquid environment. This new proposed “universal dye” for all kinds of fibers in PIL environment was analyzed under different operational dyeing conditions. The obtained results were satisfying when compared with standard dyeing quality parameters reported in earlier published literature, thus opening opportunities for innovation and optimization.