Preparation and filtration performance of the circular weft-knitted seamless weft-insertion fabric materials

Air particulate matter pollution has become a severe environment concern calling for filtration materials with great filtration performance. As the development of seamless forming technology, knitted filtration materials gradually show great potential. This study aimed to develop a novel kind of knitted seamless structure for filtration materials of filter bags with high production efficiency and excellent filtration performance. A new type of the circular weft-knitted seamless weft-insertion fabric (CKSW) filtration materials were developed on the modified circular knitting machine. This CKSW filtration materials consisting of the ground yarns, connection yarns and weft-insertion yarns, polyester full drawn yarns, and polyester draw texturing yarns with different yarn configurations were employed to realize series of CKSW samples. The polytetrafluoroethylene filaments with tourmaline particles were used to verify whether the static electric material produced an adsorption filtration effect on the CKSW filtration materials or not. After pretreatment, the filtration performance of the CKSW filtration materials was evaluated by analyzing its pore size, porosity, and filtration efficiency. Ultimately, the CKSW filtration materials with ground yarns and weft insertion yarns of draw texturing yarn and the connection yarns of full drawn yarn exhibited the most excellent filtration performance. The CKSW filtration materials show a high porosity of 87.14%, the pore size of 67.55 mu m, and good filtration efficiency of 91.57% with the particles size of >= 5.0 mu m. The successful fabrication of such knitted filtration materials may provide ideas for the development of filtration materials with new architecture mainly used as filter bags for baghouse.