Quaternary ammonium salts functionalized cotton fibers with highly effective and durable antibacterial performances for daily healthcare textile applications

The pandemics of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have made us realize the significantly importance of healthcare textiles even in daily lives. Design and development of highly effective antibacterial textiles with high durability and comfortability, but low cost have aroused intensive attraction especially in the post-pandemic era. In this study, a novel two-step modification strategy including oxidation process and subsequent grafting process was reported to functionalize the commonly and widely utilized cotton fibers with quaternary ammonium salts. The antibacterial rate of grafted cotton fibers against E. coli, S. aureus, and C. albicans was demonstrated to be all more than 99%. Importantly, they also exhibited high antibacterial sustainability, and the antibacterial rate against E. coli, S. aureus, and C. albicans was found to be ∼97%, > 99%, and ∼93% after 100 times of washing. The grafted cotton fibers were further utilized to blend with common cotton fibers with different weight ratios, and further processed into a series of different nonwoven fabrics by a combination of carding and spunlace technique, demonstrating the great proccessability of as-grafted cotton fibers. It was found that only adding 10% grafted cotton fibers could impart the nonwovens with strong antibacterial efficiency (∼90% on E. coli, >99% on S. aurus, and ∼85% on C. albicans). Moreover, the grafted cotton fibers also possessed high cytocompatibility and nontoxicity to human dermal fibroblasts just similar with untreated cotton fibers. In all, the present study provided a simple and cost-effective technique roadmap with mild reaction conditions, which demonstrated the feasibility of functionalizing the common cotton fibers with highly effective and durable antibacterial performances but without disturbing the original spinnability, thus representing an obvious technique step forward toward the fabrication of advanced functional textiles with low cost that can be widely applied in daily lives.