Impact of Use of Surfactants and a Pulse Sonicator on Length and Fiber Count Determinations for Natural and Synthetic Microfibers Using the OpTest Fiber Quality Analyzer

There is growing concern about the ubiquitous presence of microfibers in waterways, atmosphere, and soil. Thus, the study of microfibers is of interest. Presently, there is no standard method for quantifying microfibers, so the objective of the current study was to employ a Fiber Quality Analyzer 360 (FQA) to examine microfibers with image analysis. In this study, two surfactants, Teric 169 and Surfonic LF-17, have been independently added to synthetic and natural microfiber suspensions to investigate their impact on arithmetic length and fiber count measurements. Herein, it has been observed that surfactants with pulsed sonication were shown to positively impact the synthetic microfibers suspensions, yielding statistically different higher fiber counts compared to the controls. However, the natural microfibers were found to produce fiber counts independent of the surfactant addition when compared to controls. In addition, the arithmetic lengths for polyester and nylon increased compared to a previous study, whereas the acrylic microfibers only changed marginally. Clearly, these results indicated that, with the pulsed sonication and surfactant addition pretreatment to water suspensions of microfibers, the FQA can be used to quickly and easily examine synthetic and natural microfibers in a single research study.