A research about the effect of the anti-pilling treatments on different structured cotton knitted fabrics

Pilling is one of the main quality problems especially encountered in cotton knitted fabrics. Since the pilling formation can cause decrement in usage life and quality of fabric and also affect the appearance of the fabric negatively, the elimination of this problem is crucially important. In order to eliminate or decrease this problem, usually chemical finishing treatments can be applied to the fabrics. The aim of this study is to analyze the effect of textile finishing processes on the pilling problem of cotton knitted fabrics. For this purpose, the pretreated (scouring treatment) 100% cotton interlock fabrics produced from three different yarn linear densities (Ne 20, Ne 30, Ne 40), yarn twist coefficients (?e=3.2, ?e=3.6, ?e=4.0) and fabric tightness (dense, middle, loose) were treated with two different enzymes and one anti-pilling finish agent at two different concentration. Then, the pilling tests were carried out and the results were compared with each other statistically. The type and concentration of the agents and the structural characteristics of the fabrics were taken into account in this comparison. As a result, it was found that pilling tendency of the cotton fabrics could be decreased by applying anti-pilling agent based on polyacrylate especially in higher concentration. © 2015, Ege Universitesi. All rights reserved