Role Of Optical Brightening Agents on Different Types of Fabrics

The colouring component present in fibre gets decolorized by various bleaching methods, no matter it is a natural colour or incorporated as contaminant in the cloth. However, the texture of textile component is creamish in colour after bleaching. Therefore, organic treatments are essential to neutralize the yellow hue of textile fibres.

There are two methods that are taken into consideration to bleach textile fibres. The blue tinting agents absorb yellow part of light and reflect blue highlighted colour after absorption. The total light reflected by absorption is less than the total incident light.

With the help of fluorescent Optical Brightening Agents:

Optical Brightening Agents, better known as OBA’s, in short, are widely used in paper, plastic, paper and detergent industries. The optical brightening effect is gained by the incorporation of light, which means that the amount of light reflected by the fluorescent whitening agents captivate high energy radiations in violet and ultraviolet region on the portion of characteristic molecules and emanate low energy radiation in blue portion in visible spectrum. This visible spectrum yields the countering of yellow appearance. FWA must be clear on the substrate and should not absorb the visible portion of the spectrum. OBA’s are operative with different clothes only when the incident light has a significant percentage of UV radiations. When fabrics are treated with OBA’s and exposed to UV black light source they luminosities in the dark. Anion containing OBA’s drained out from silk, cotton and wool while, cationic OBA’s drained out from certain polyesters and acrylic. If we talk about non-ionic OBA’s, it gets exhausted on all synthetic fibres. One should always hire reputed Optical Brightening Agent Manufacturers to get high-quality components at affordable prices.

Highlighting properties of Optical Brightening Agents for textiles:

Before selecting an Optical Brightening Agent for textiles operations, one must look for following properties:

1. The Optical Brightening Agent must have high solubility; it should have high sustainability for fabric substrate under OBA application

2. The component should not have its own texture

3. Optical Brightening Agents should have high-quality fastness and lightening properties

4. Strike rate on the substrate must be considered

5. Exhaustion properties and building up time

6. Requirement of electrolytes and their sensitivity towards various agents and fabrics

7. Temperature effect on exhaustion

8. Build up properties of the OBA

9. Effect of water hardness

10. Sensitivity towards pH change

11. Application pH range

12. It must have high penetrating properties and good levelling

13. Should not putrefy to textured products on exposure to environmental conditions and prolonged storage

14. It should not absorb light in visible region

15. It should go well with auxiliary, finishing chemicals and processes such as temperature and heat

16. It should be stable and quick to common reductive and oxidative bleaching agents and systems