Obtaining Polysaccharide-Based Fabrics with Improved Moisture Sorption and Dye Adsorption Properties

Featured Application: This work has a potential application in biocarpet engineering, which involves the use of cyanobacterial crusts either in the rehabilitation of damaged land surfaces or to combat desertification. Attempts to apply cyanobacterial crusts have not been completely successful so far because the growth of the initial inoculum requires more moisture than arid and semiarid environments can provide. To accelerate the development of the inoculum, it is necessary to provide additional moisture for the growth of cyanobacterial cells. Controlled water delivery could be achieved by using moisture-retentive material that is applied together with the inoculum in the treatment of damaged surfaces. Biocarpet engineering has the potential to solve not only some problems of damaged surfaces and desertification but also reduce and prevent air and water pollution caused by erosion. Raw jute fabric was treated with 0.5, 1.0, or 2.0% chitosan solution to improve its sorption properties (evaluated through the moisture sorption and adsorption of textile dye Reactive Orange 16 (RO 16)), which are essential for fabric utilization as geo-prebiotic polysaccharide support that should provide the necessary water for the growth of cyanobacterial communities in biocarpet engineering. Chitosan-treated fabrics possessed 39–78% higher moisture sorption values than the untreated ones. Concerning the dye adsorption, with the increase in its initial concentration, the adsorption potential of raw and fabrics treated with 0.5 or 1.0% chitosan solution was increased up to 1.9 times. The dye adsorption onto these fabrics was exothermic and enthalpy driven. By increasing the chitosan solution percentage up to 1.0%, fabric adsorption potential increased up to 2.2 times. An inverse relationship was observed in the case of the fabric treated with 2.0% chitosan solution, its adsorption potential decreased with increasing the initial dye concentration and temperature due to the different dominant binding interactions. Concerning the contact time, dye adsorption onto fabric treated with 1.0% chitosan solution was rapid in the first 2 h, while the equilibrium was attained after 4.5 h. The isotherm and kinetic data were represented by the Langmuir model and the pseudo-second-order kinetic model, respectively