Textile industry, supercritical carbon dioxide

Supercritical carbon dioxide has been industrially used in a variety of processes, including coffee decaffeination, tea decaffeination, and extraction of fatty acids from spent barley, pyrethrum, hops, spices, flavors, fragrances, com oil, and color from red peppers. Other applications include polymerization, polymer fractionation, particle formation for pharmaceutical and military use, textile dyeing, and cleaning of machine and electronic parts. 

Extraction using supercritical carbon dioxide has been an established industrial-scale technique for many years. High-pressure CO2 extraction is already widely used, for example, for dealcoholization decaffeination of coffee and tea processing of tobacco, hops, spices, and fats and oils from both vegetable and animal sources and also to extract specific compounds or active ingredients for the food, beverage, and tobacco sector and in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, as well as in the fields of cosmetics, leafher, textile, paints, and beverages. 

Elimination of the water process and chemicals is a real and significant breakthrough for the textile dyeing industry. This new process utilizes supercritical fiuid carbon dioxide (COj) for dyeing textile-materials. It is a completely waterless dyeing process using only nominal amounts of CO, nearly all of which is recycled. DryDye fabrics dyed with this unique waterless process will have the same dye qualities and durability as cmrent, conventionally dyed fabrics, a spokesperson for the Yeh Group said. 

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