Study of nanosilica coated and polyaniline grafted cotton fabric

Valuable biomass product nanosilica obtained from rice husk has been hybridized with polyaniline through grafting and was used as coating material over cotton fabric using 3-aminopropyltriethoxysilane as crosslinking agent. In order to optimize the coating percentages of nanosilica and polyaniline, different weight concentration of both sodium silicate and aniline were used to develop the nanosilica coated and polyaniline grafted cotton fabric. The resulting cotton fabrics were studied for their UV shielding property, thermal and basic fabric properties. Cotton fabric coated with 50% of aniline and 0.75% of silica (S0.75A50C) affords the highest Ultraviolet Protection Factor (UPF) as 46.2. The result shows that the nanosilica coated and polyaniline grafted cotton fabric possess higher UV shielding when compared with that of neat cotton fabric.