Carrier assisted dyeing of m-aramid fibers

The excellence in quality of Biella wool fabric, provided from the last 40 years one of first position in all over the world for the “Biella textile district”. In the last decade competition of developing countries became ruthless regarding the common textile like wool for a lot of reason, first of all cheaper labor. Industries started to move production over there but, fortunately, the know-how has remained here. For these reasons, since the past 10 years the world of textile, especially in Europe and USA, is moving to another kind of textile and garments dimension: the Technical Textile. Aramids are, since 90’s, the most important technical textile for protection garments, and in Biella district a lot of factories started to handle them. Since some factories started to produce yarn and fabric for protective garments, the need to dye them has come. The market nowadays requires, even for protective goods, not only the conventional coloration with which the fiber is produced in large scale by manufacturers, but all the typical color ranges of other common textile fibers. Nomex® fiber is probably the most important m-aramid used for this scope and its dyeing recipes are well known. However, Nomex® is not easily available for factories due to particular commercial agreements, and is very expensive. Other branded m-aramid fibers exist on the market having same technical properties of Nomex® but, unfortunately, not exactly the same dyeability. In 2010 a regional research project called FILIDEA was born between Politecnico di Torino and Marchi&Fildi Company. One of the 6 research working packages was thought to overcome the difficulties in dyeing a m-aramid fiber called X-Fiper® and produced by a Chinese company called SRO. From this project, since the important results obtained in the first two years of research work, a Ph.D. project was born in 2012. Therefore, the aim of this Ph.D. project is to investigate the dyeing process of this particular fiber starting from the examination of its properties.