Multifunctional sodium Alginate@ urushiol fiber with targeted Antibacterial, acid corrosion resistance and flame retardant properties for personal protection based on wet spinning

The protective clothing may face acid, high temperature, and bacterial attack in the process of use, affecting its protection efficiency, and multifunctional protective clothing that can meet a variety of needs appear more potential applications. However, multifunctional personal protection clothing has remained an unmet challenge. Here we report a new type of multifunctional clothing via a simple, environmentally friendly wet spinning method to load the urushiol with acid corrosion and antibacterial functions on sodium alginate fiber. This structure uniformly disperses a certain content of urushiol in sodium alginate solution, allowing alginate fibers to have flame retardant properties while having high acid resistance and excellent targeted antibacterial properties. Compared to alginate fibers, the fabricated fibers were treated with different concentrations of sulfuric acid, although the strength was reduced to a certain extent, the fibers retained their original shape and were not dissolved. The thermal analysis showed the fiber also has good flame retardant better than viscose fiber. In addition, the fabricated fiber has targeted antibacterial properties, with an efficiency of 99.99% against Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and bacteriostatic effect on Escherichia coli (E. coli), and good biocompatibility under low concentration conditions. Our work may provide new insights for the development of “green” multifunctional protective clothing. It also provides a research possibility for absorbable surgical sutures.