Clothes, shoes, socks, household items, textiles are indispensable in daily life. When purchasing, in addition to looking at the color and style, consumers will have a very important criterion for judgment, that is, the material. In general, natural materials such as silk, cotton, linen, and wool are very popular with the public. Correspondingly, chemical fibers and artificial materials with words such as nylon, brocade, and viscose are often disliked. What are the advantages of pure natural fabrics? The most basic unit of textiles is fiber. According to the source classification, textile fibers are divided into natural fibers and chemical fibers. Natural fibers provide the initial cold-proof materials for human development. 5,000 years ago in the Indian subcontinent, people began to spin yarn with cotton fibers; in the ancient Egyptian period in the Nile River Basin, flax was widely planted by humans to make textile products; as early as more than 5,000 years ago, the working people of our country began to grow mulberry, raise silkworms, draw silk, and weave silk, and formed a unique silk textile culture. At present, cotton fiber, linen fiber, wool fiber and silk fiber (abbreviated as cotton, linen, silk, and wool) are still the main natural materials for daily textiles. These natural materials have their own advantages, but they also have certain defects. Different from the natural fibers given to humans by animals and plants in nature, chemical fibers are a type of fiber made by chemical methods.
Chemical fibers can be divided into chemical synthetic fibers, artificial fibers (usually called regenerated fibers) and inorganic fibers according to their raw materials and components.
The history of chemical fibers is only a short 100 years. The first chemical fiber invented by humans was viscose fiber, which was launched in 1893. Its success quickly expanded the family of chemical fibers. How can we distinguish between artificial fibers with very "academic" names? It's very simple. The fibers ending with "纶" that are often seen when buying textiles are generally chemical synthetic fibers. For example, polyester, nylon, acrylic, spandex, polypropylene, etc. Synthetic fibers are organic polymer compounds synthesized by addition polymerization or condensation polymerization using small molecular organic compounds as raw materials. Most synthetic fibers come from petroleum. The petrochemical system extracts and separates the small molecular organic compounds needed to produce such fibers through layers of extraction and separation. Chemical synthetic fibers made from petroleum raw materials are sometimes also called "petroleum-based fibers". In terms of output, synthetic fibers are the largest category in the chemical fiber and even the entire textile fiber family. In 2019, my country's synthetic fiber output reached more than 54 million tons, accounting for 92.8% of the chemical fiber family; while my country's cotton output was 5.9 million tons and silk output was only 68,000 tons during the same period.
Artificial fibers are made from natural polymer compounds such as cellulose and protein, which are chemically processed into polymer concentrated solutions, and then spun and post-processed to produce textile fibers. Regenerated fibers are often also called "artificial fibers". The most common regenerated fibers in textile fibers are viscose fibers (also known as rayon or artificial cotton), modal fibers, and lyocell fibers (also known as Tencel). Artificial fibers directly use natural polymer compounds, do not consume petroleum resources, and the fiber properties are different from those of chemical synthetic fibers.
There are many choices for chemical fibers, and shortcomings may also be highlights. The emergence of chemical fibers has greatly enriched the variety and performance of textiles, and also given products some functions and characteristics that are different from natural fiber materials. For example, the notable feature of polyester is its poor hydrophilicity, which makes polyester fabric easy to dry. Many high-quality quick-drying sportswear are made of ultrafine polyester. Ultrafine fibers accelerate the evaporation of sweat on the fiber surface, keeping the surface of the human body dry and comfortable during exercise; while the fibrillation characteristics of lyocell fibers are used to produce fabrics with a peach-skin style.
my country is a strong country in the production and research and development of chemical fibers, and the proportion of chemical fiber output accounts for more than 70% of the world. With the advancement of technology and changes in consumer concepts, chemical fibers are also in a state of continuous improvement. Their "disadvantages" are often fully utilized to develop specific products, mainly in terms of functionality and comfort.
After the characteristics of natural fibers and chemical fibers are fully recognized, people often use blending or interweaving processes in product development to combine the advantages of natural fibers and chemical fibers, thereby achieving the effect of 1+1>2. The most common example is polyester-cotton blended fabrics, which are usually made of 65% polyester and 35% cotton fibers. The strength, abrasion resistance and shape retention of polyester-cotton blended fabrics are better than those of pure cotton fabrics, while also having a certain degree of moisture absorption and soft feel.
