Water absorptive polymer materials made from abolishing wool and the interaction with water

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In making the resource recycling as a functional material of abolishing wool to be final purpose, the addition of water-absorbability by succinylation has been studied. In this study, by the succinylation in homogeneous system using keratein obtained by reductively solubilization of wool fibers, it succeeded in getting succinylated keratein of add-ons of 29.6%, which is higher than the case by the conventional heterogeneous system. Sought were the optimum conditions for insolubilization by cross-linking of the succinylated keratein with four multifunctional epoxides, ethyleneglycol diglycidyl ether, sorbitol polyglycidyl ether, diglycerol polyglycidyl ether and NK catalyst A. The keratein derivative which was succinylated and insolubilized using ethyleneglycol diglycidyl ether, showed the highest water absorbance (25g/g) in the examined keratein derivatives. Partial hydrolysis or reduction followed by succinylation in a heterogeneous system also gave high water absorbability to wool fibers, though these processes are simpler than the above ones. Partially hydrolyzed/succinylated wool and reduced/succinylated wool shows high hygroscopicity especially under the high humidity conditions over ca. 70%RH and both these treatments remarkably increased quantity of non-freezing water in the fibers. Crystallinity decreased more significantly after succinylation than the pretreatments, which shows that the crystalline region of the pretreated wool fibers was succinylated as well as the amorphous region. The water absorbability, hygroscopicity and quantity of non-freezing water increased after succinylation, which suggests that enrichment of carboxyl group by succinylation influences strongly on these properties.