Salt-Free Dyeing of Cotton Fabric Using 3-Chloro-2-Hydroxypropyltrimethyl Ammonium Chloride by Pad-Irradiate-Pad-Steam Process, and Prediction of Its K/S Value by LS-SVM

Based on conventional pad-dry-pad-steam (PDPS) process, 3-chloro-2-hydroxypropyltrimethylammonium chloride was used as an etherifying agent to cationize cotton by the pad-irradiate process by microwave and then the cationized fabric was salt-free dyed by the pad-steam process. The results showed that the dyeability of the cationized fabric with salt-free reactive dye was nearly equivalent with conventional PDPS process. This study also developed a model to predict K/S value of dyed cotton fabric based on least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM). The simulation results based on actual run data demonstrated that the model using LS-SVM has high prediction accuracy and can be employed to predict the K/S value of dyed fabric using pad-irradiate-pad-steam process.