Tensile Strength and Dispersibility of Pulp/Danufil Wet-Laid Hydroentangled Nonwovens

Chao Deng; R Hugh Gong; Chen Huang; Xing Zhang; Xiang-Yu Jin

doi:10.3390/ma12233931

Tensile Strength and Dispersibility of Pulp/Danufil Wet-Laid Hydroentangled Nonwovens

Materials (Basel). 2019 Nov 27;12(23):3931. doi: 10.3390/ma12233931.

Authors

Chao Deng¹, R Hugh Gong², Chen Huang¹, Xing Zhang¹, Xiang-Yu Jin¹

Affiliations

¹ Engineering Research Center of Technical Textiles, Ministry of Education, College of Textiles, Donghua University, Shanghai 201620, China.
² Textile Technology, School of Materials, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.

Abstract

Wet-laid hydroentangled nonwovens are widely used for disposable products, but these products generally do not have good dispersibility and can block sewage systems after being discarded into toilets. In this study, both pulp fibers and Danufil fibers are selected as we hypothesize that the high wet strength and striated surface of Danufil fibers would allow us to produce nonwovens with better dispersibility while having enough mechanical properties. The wet strength and dispersibility of nonwovens are systematically studied by investigating the influence of the fiber blend ratio, fiber length, and water jet pressure. The results indicate that the percent dispersion could be as high as 81.3% when the wet strength is higher than 4.8 N, which has been improved greatly comparing the percent dispersion of 67.6% reported before.

Keywords: dispersibility; hydroentanglement.; nonwovens; tensile strength; wet-laid.