Single step process reduces flammability of cotton

Developed by researchers from Texas A&M University, the coating can be tailored for various textiles, such as clothing or upholstery, and scaled using the common pad-dry coating process, which is suitable for industrial applications.   

“Many of the materials in our day-to-day lives are flammable, and offering a solution to protect from fire benignly is difficult,” said Maya D. Montemayor, a graduate student in the Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M and the publication’s lead author. “This technology can be optimised to quickly, easily, and safely flame retard many flammable materials, offering vast protection in everyday life, saving money and lives of the general population.”   

Current studies developing flame retardant coatings deposited via polyelectrolyte complexation require two or more steps, increasing the time and cost to coat a material effectively.   

In contrast, this study recently published in ACS Applied Polymer Materials hopes to achieve the same results using one step. The researchers address this issue by incorporating a volatile base, a molecule that evaporates under ambient conditions. Using ammonia as the volatile base, the base evaporates to reduce the pH and induce complexation, a chemical reaction that forms a stable complex, on the cotton’s surface. Until now, this technique has been proposed but never used to prepare a flame-retardant treatment.