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Development and evaluation of dustless fabrics for medical applications

Dust-free fabrics and garments are essentially used in hospitals to maintain hygiene in operation theatres and also in various other industrial establishments, such as cleaning electronic chip manufacturing rooms. It is also needed for personal health care of allergy and asthma patients. In order to design a dust-free fabric, it is very important to study the characteristics of the textile materials that influence dust attraction. In this work, the dust particle size and its distribution on different types of fabrics with different fibre types have been studied making use of non-conventional instruments. As of today, there is no instrumental technique available for studying the dust concentration on textile substrates. Therefore, there is a need for developing an instrument that would measure dust particle size and their concentration on textile materials. A digital dust analyzer has been developed for this purpose. This instrument is calibrated by standard dust particles that have similar properties as that of atmospheric dust particles. The reference dust particle size falls in the range of 0.1–198 μ m. A set of fabrics were selected to study the effect of fabric properties towards dust attraction. The results revealed that lowest dust accumulation occurs on plain woven 100% polyester fabrics followed by polyester–cotton blends. The dust-less fabrics developed through different techniques such as polyurethane coating, silicone finishing and weaving of metallic filaments showed satisfactory improvement in their functional properties. Polyurethane coated fabrics give best results followed by silicone finish fabrics and metallic yarn woven fabrics. Based on the analysis and understanding of the results, some of the factors influencing the dust affinity of fabrics are established.