Correlation between the cross-linking and degradation activation energy of cotton fabric treated with chitosan kinetic study by ‘model-free’ multiple heating rate methods

The different concentrations of chitosan were applied on cotton fabrics using glutaraldehyde as a cross-linking agent. The fabric samples were thermally analysed from ambient temperature to 700 °C at four different linear heating rates, i.e. 2.5, 5, 10 and 20 °C min−1 in a flowing nitrogen medium. Non-isothermal ‘model-free’ multiple heating rate methods like Friedman and Kissinger–Akahira–Sunose have been employed for the determination of degradation activation energy of the samples. The degradation mechanism based on activation energy calculation at different conversions has been proposed and compared with the extent of cross-linking. Also the method of universal master plots has been employed on isothermal data and worked on different models and their optimizations. This research work tries to achieve a correlation between activation energy and extent of cross-linking with the increase in chitosan concentration to the fabric.