Polyphenol-Assisted Natural Coloration on Various Synthetic Textile Materials

With the increasing awareness of sustainability development and public health in the modern society, environmentally-friendly coloration process draws tremendous attention in the textile industry. Toxic heavy metal mordants are forbidden to be used in the application of natural colorants in the coloration process. In this study, an environmentally-friendly coloration process with natural colorants on various synthetic textile materials was developed in the presence of dopamine, whose in-situ self-polymerization could produce rich polyphenolic coloration anchors. Using the proposed method, various synthetic textile materials could be easily coloured with natural colorants in a simple process, which is especially suitable to those materials which are difficult to be colored. Compared with the control process, synthetic textile materials were endowed with better exhaustion of natural colorants, as verified by their deeper colour appearance and higher K/S values. The colored materials were also characterized by colorimetric analysis as well as scanning electron microscopy and optical microscopic analysis, which also confirmed the successful application of the proposed coloration process. Moreover, the proposed strategy could also be applied on a wide variety of materials. It is an innovative green coloration process in the textile material fields.