In addition to fibroin, natural silk also contains other components, as sericin, etc. And in the manufacturing process, there is also a silk damping process, in which the spinning oil, as emulsified white oil, mineral oil and emulsified paraffin, etc. are added. Therefore, natural silk fabric should go through the scouring process to remove these natural and artificial impurities and make the silk fabric present soft and bright property. At the same time, it can facilitate the next dyeing and printing process.
The scouring process of natural silk fabric is mainly to remove sericin. Although sericin and fibroin are both protein, their amino acid composition, arrangement and supramolecular structure are very different. The content of polar amino acid in sericin protein is much higher than that in fibroin protein. And the arrangement of molecules is far less orderly than fibroin. The crystallinity of sericin protein is low and almost unoriented. So water, chemicals and proteolytic enzymes have different effects on sericin and fibroin. Sericin is less stable to chemical, physical and biological factors. Hence, we can use these characteristics to remove sericin without damaging fibroin by using appropriate methods and technological conditions.
The scouring technology of natural silk fabric can be divided into acid scouring, alkali scouring, enzyme scouring and surfactant scouring, etc. At present, alkali scouring technology is widely applied in production. In order to improve the quality of scouring products, all kinds of high-efficient scouring agents have been developed and applied successively. Most of them are compounds of surfactants, chelating agents and alkaline agents, etc. Except for the high-efficient scouring agents, silk dyeing factory often use surfactants such as LamePon A and dispersing agent WA, etc., and add chelating and dispersing agent, sodium silicate and sodium carbonate, etc. as the scouring agent for natural silk fabric.
It can also use enzyme to scour natural silk fabric.
Post time: Jul-04-2022