Composition of raw wool

By wool the animal hair is called, widely used in textile and light industiy. The strac-ture and chemical composition of the wool fiber significantly differ it from other types of fibers and shows great variety and heterogeneity of properties. Sheep, camef goat, and rabbit wool is used as the raw material. 

It has been recognised for centuries that certain natural dyes, including alizarin, kermes, cochineal and fustic, now known to contain o-dihydroxy phenolic or anthraquinonoid residues in their structures, can be fixed on natural fibres using oxides or salts of transition metals as mordants. Although mordanted wool dyed with alizarin showed excellent fastness, reproducibility of shade was difficult to achieve because of the variable composition of the raw materials available. The famous Turkey red, in which alizarin was applied to aluminium-mordanted wool in the presence of calcium salts, formed a metallised complex the nature of which remains in considerable doubt. 

Dominguez, C. Jover, E. Bayona, J.M. Erra, P. Effects of carbon dioxide modifier on the lipid composition of wool wax extracted from raw wool. Anal. Chim. Acta 2003, 477 (2), 233-242. 

DRIFT spectroscopy of microscopic amounts of dye mixtures extracted from small textile samples has been reported raw and pretreated data matrices were interpreted with the use of chemomet-rics (PCA, SIMCA, FC) [145]. DRIFTS can readily detect 200 ng quantities of pure, standard dyes. Bridge et al. [42] have qualitatively characterised acid dyes (Cl Acid Red 17, Red 18, Red 44, Red 88, Blue 45 and Yellow 17) applied to wool and nylon. Near-infrared diffuse reflectance spectroscopy was evaluated for its ability to analyse solid antioxidant blends [146]. These opaque materials do not transmit near-IR light. This fast method effectively predicts weight percentage composition with a precision comparable to the currently accepted HPLC method of analysis, and can identify blend types and contaminated materials. 

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