BigPatents India

Scouring is an important pretreatment operation in the processing of cotton and cotton blended materials. This is done to remove the non-cellulosic constituents of cotton fibre which make the fibre non-absorbent posing serious technical problems in the subsequent wet processing operations. The conventional process involves boiling the fabric in 1% NaOH solution at 15 lbs pressure/sq inch for four hours followed by bleaching and dyeing. Anaerobic treatment of the fabric in a stabilised microbial consortium for 10 hours at room temperature followed by boiling in water containing 0.5% NaOH for 15 minutes has been found to be on par with the conventional kiering process. The method has been found to be economical and ecofriendly and can be replacement to the conventional kiering process which is energy intensive.