Scalable and Environmentally Benign Process for Smart Textile Nanofinishing

Abstract

A major challenge in nanotechnology is that of determining how to introduce green and sustainable principles when assembling individual nanoscale elements to create working devices.For instance, textile nanofinishing is restricted by the many constraints of traditional pad-drycure processes, such as the use of costly chemical procedures to produce nanoparticles (NPs), the high liquid and energy consumption, the production of harmful liquid waste, and multi-step batch operations. By integrating low-cost, scalable, and environmentally benign aerosol processes of the type proposed here into textile nanofinishing, these constraints can be circumvented while leading to a new class of fabrics. The proposed one-step textile nanofinishing process relies on the diffusional deposition of aerosol NPs onto textile fibers. As proof of this concept, we deposit Ag NPs onto a range of textiles and assess their antimicrobial properties for two strains of bacteria (i.e., Staphylococcus Aureus and Klebsiella Pneumoniae).The measurements show that the logarithmic reduction in bacterial count reaches ca. 5.5 (corresponding to a reduction efficiency of 99.96%) when the Ag loading is one order of magnitude less (10 ppm; i.e., 10 mg Ag NPs per kg of textile) than in the textiles treated by traditional wet-routes. The antimicrobial activity does not increase in proportion to the Ag content above 10 ppm as a consequence of a "saturation" effect. Such low loading for

Internally mixed nanoparticles from oscillatory spark ablation between electrodes of different materials

“…This phenomenon has been pointed out (Lahiri et al 2005;Xiong et al 2011), and related to the fact that a large fraction of the atoms occupies the material interface that influences their miscibility. Overall, producing singlet mixed NPs for which one can have great control over their size (Feng et al 2015(Feng et al , 2016c can enormously extends the capabilities and scope of resulting functional materials (Kim et al 2006;Byeon and Roberts 2012;Anastasopol et al 2013;Byeon and Kim 2014;Isaac et al 2015;Feng et al 2016b;Jang et al 2016;Kang et al 2016).…”

Hydrogen-assisted spark discharge generated metal nanoparticles to prevent oxide formation

“…In SDG, the particle purity is mainly limited by the electrode material and the carrier gas, and is even comparable to the particle purity for laser ablation (Itina andVoloshko 2013, Pfeiffer et al 2014). Furthermore, SDG has the potential to be up-scaled for industrial nanoparticle production by using, for example, several energy-efficient switched SDG units (Pfeiffer et al 2014) in parallel (Feng et al 2016a) at kHz discharge frequencies (Noh et al 2017). However, similar to most aerosol generation routes, it is challenging to produce unoxidized particles of non-noble metals.…”

On the plasma and electrode erosion processes in spark discharge nanoparticle generators

“…Nanoparticles produced by SDGs satisfy the needs of a broad range of applications. Sparkproduced NPs have already shown their strength in various fields, including solar cell research [95,96], semiconductor science [20,97], environmental research [18,98], sensors [99,100], or even in the textile industry [101]. These examples are, of course, at different technological readiness levels.…”

“…The antibacterial effect of Ag NPs produced in an SDG and deposited onto textiles was tested recently [101]. It has been shown that, when spark-produced Ag NPs are used, an order of magnitude less Ag loading is sufficient to achieve equivalent antimicrobial effect than the NPs generated via wet routes.…”

“…It has been shown that, when spark-produced Ag NPs are used, an order of magnitude less Ag loading is sufficient to achieve equivalent antimicrobial effect than the NPs generated via wet routes. Moreover, an efficient, single-step, scalable method was also proposed, which could be directly integrated into textile production lines [101].…”