Coated acrylic fabric for antimicrobial and antioxidant textiles

Acrylic polymer, a significant synthetic fabric used in the textile industry, was selected to provide it with multifunctional characteristics. For this purpose, the acrylic fabric was functionalised with amidoxime groups to serve as ligands for immobilising silver ions so that it can be further in situ reduced to AgNPs. Polydopamine (PDA) has the advantage of being an ion binding and reducing agent by virtue of its phenolic hydroxyl groups capable of reducing silver ions to AgNPs, and it was exploited in the study for imparting the acrylic fabric with antimicrobial and antioxidant properties. Additionally, glucose as a reducing agent was also used to form AgNPs-loaded amidoximated acrylic fabric. The pristine, amidoximated, PDA-coated AgNPs-loaded amidoximated, and AgNPs-loaded amidoximated acrylic fabrics have been characterised using ATR-FTIR, SEM, EDX, and tensile strength. All fabric samples were assessed as antioxidants using DPPH and FRAP assays.

Excellent antioxidant and antimicrobial properties

Antimicrobial properties against Pseudomonas Aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli and Candida albicans were also evaluated using broth assay. An almost complete killing (99.99%) of the pathogenic Gram-negative Escherichia coli was achieved using PDA-coated AgNPs-loaded amidoximated acrylic fabric. The overall results indicated that the composite nanocoating using PDA-AgNPs showed good tensile strength and excellent antioxidant and antimicrobial properties to suggest the viability of PDA-AgNPs coating of fabrics for possible application as biomedical textiles.

The study has been published in Journal of Coatings Technology and Research, Volume 20, Issue 3, May 2023.