A new technique to prepare a hydrophobic and thermal insulating polyester woven fabric using electro-spraying of nano-porous silica powder

This paper studies the potential electro-spraying of a polyester woven fabric by silica aerogel particles using a fluorocarbon finishing method. For the first time, the samples of different mixtures of silica aerogel and fluorocarbon were prepared and successfully coated on the polyester fabrics using an electro-spraying process. The prepared fabrics were characterized by FTIR, SEM, and EDS and compared with the un-treated sample in term of some physical properties including heat transfer, 3 M water repellency, water contact angle, air permeability and abrasion fastness. According to the results, a decreasing trend in the heat transfer was observed from 71.65 (0.5)% for the un-sprayed fabric to 38.35 (1.06) and 30.99 (0.4)% for the electro-sprayed fabrics for 16 and 24 h, respectively. As for the air permeability, a similar trend was observed in which the sample containing a higher amount of aerogel has less air permeability. Also, the results indicated that the presence of aerogel particles improves the hydrophobic properties of the electro-sprayed samples. Thus, the sample electro-sprayed with the aerogel/fluorocarbon mixture for 24 h, showed the most hydrophobicity with the contact angle of 152.2 (0.8)degrees. Also, the weight losses of the sprayed samples after the abrasion test were insignificantly less than 5% leading to a low dust-releasing behavior of the aerogel particles from the fibers surface.