Development of Functional Nonwoven Materials from Knitted Garment Waste Recycled fibers through Recycled Opener Machine for Thermal Insulation Application

Abstract

The knitted fabric wastes recycled from cotton and polyester fibers have a possible input of raw materials that can be used for thermal insulation function. The nonwovens for this research were developed by chemical bonding method with a spray bonding technique using poly vinyl acetate latex binder (PVA). All the six samples have been a proportion of 100% recycled cotton, 100% recycled polyester, 50/50, 70/30, 30/70 and 60/40 recycled cotton and polyester. The samples were confirmed for thermal
insulation function. Their physical and thermal behaviors were tested with respect to ASTM and ISO standard. The results revealed that the nonwovens were prepared from recycled cotton and polyester knitted fabric wastes, which are suitable for the thermal insulation application. The recycled waste cotton and polyester knitted fabric waste nonwovens have the ability to insulate without disturbing the thermal insulation properties. The results exposed that the nonwovens produced from 30% recycled cotton and 70% recycled polyester (S5) sample have the highest value and 50% recycled cotton and 50% recycled polyester (S3) sample
with chemical bonded nonwovens have the next higher value with a thermal insulation value of 0.0606 and 0.0518 thermal resistance value respectively, sample S5 has better thermal insulation performance as compared to the all other samples. It’s concluded that the insulation property of the nonwoven fabrics increases with increasing the layer/thickness of nonwovens and fabric weight. Finally, from this research, fabric thickness, fabric weight, air permeability and nonwovens thermal conductivity have an important effect on thermal insulation ability of the developed chemical bonded nonwovens.