Effect of Batching and Microwave Heating Time on Color Properties of Cotton Fabric Dyed with Reactive Dyes on Laboratory Scale

Abstract

The fixation using a batching technique on a Cold-Pad-Batch (CPB) reactive dyeing process at room temperature is typically carried out for several hours to get a good color strength on the cotton fabric. The lengthy batching time becomes a problem when undertaking the color matching process because the operator must wait long enough to get the dyeing results evaluated before the production process. In this work, we tried to shorten the batching time by adding a microwave heating step after the batching process (Cold-Pad-Batch-Microwave) and then compared the dyeing results in terms of color strength (K/S) and color difference (ΔE) between both methods. Experiment results revealed that the Cold-Pad-Batch-Microwave dyeing method can be used to shorten the dyeing time to get similar color strength value as opposed to the conventional Cold-Pad-Batch dyeing. The batching time of 1 hour and the microwave heating time 25 minutes are the recommenced condition in the Cold-Pad-Batch-Microwave dyeing method which has comparable K/S values of the conventional CPB method and has good ΔE value.