Fabric damage

Choose peroxygen bleaches over hypochlorite to minimize color fading or fabric damage. 

Laundry powders in Europe use sodium percarbonate and a bleach activator, tetraacetylethylenediamine ( ED), to form peracetic acid in the washing machine that then reacts with bleachable stains such as tea, red wine, coffee, and curry to remove /bleach them from cloth. Transition metal ions, in particular copper, cause first decomposition of peracetic add before it can bleach stains and second react with peroxide to form highly readive hydroxyl radicals that can cause dye and fabric damage [32]. Chelants bind with copper and other metals to prevent these unwanted side readions. 

Carbonate compounds offer an economical means of reducing the calcium content and also raising the alkalinity of the wash water. They lower the concentration of the calcium by precipitating it in the form of calcium carbonate. This could lead to fabric damage in the form of encrustation, which becomes especially apparent after repeated washing cycles under high water hardness conditions. Fortunately, this is not a major problem in unstructured HDLDs since the amount of carbonate used in the formulation is limited due to solubility restrictions. Compounds such... 

Sometimes dye damage is a first step to fabric damage, as a reactive intermediate in this process may be able to interact with polymeric cotton molecules, resulting in a weakening of the fiber. On a molecular level, the cellulose units are oxidized to form carbonyl compounds, and carbon-carbon bonds are broken. Under the stress conditions of the washing process, the fiber then will tear and the garment is irreversibly damaged. 

Two methods are used for determining the fabric-damaging properties of bleach systems tensile strength loss, on a macroscopic level, and the decrease in the degree of polymerization, on a microscopic level. Recently it was shown that there is only poor correlation between the resnlts of both test methods. To obtain reliable data, measnranent of tensile strength loss after 20 or 50 wash... 

Luijkx, G. C., Hild, R., Krijnen, E. S. et al., Testing of the fabric damage properties of bleach containing detergents, Tenside Surfactant Detergents, 41 164-168, 2004. 

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