Rayon: "Fashion's Favorite" 1940 Dupont 32min

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• published: 11 Jan 2012
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more at http://clothing.quickfound.net/ "Tracks the manufacturing of rayon from raw material to finished product." Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archive, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and equalization. Rayon is a manufactured regenerated cellulose fiber. Because it is produced from naturally occurring polymers, it is neither a truly synthetic fiber nor a natural fiber; it is a semi-synthetic or artificial fiber. Rayon is known by the names viscose rayon and art silk in the textile industry. It usually has a high luster quality giving it a bright sheen. Some major rayon fiber uses include apparel (e.g. Aloha shirts, blouses, dresses, jackets, lingerie, linings, scarves, suits, neckties, hats, socks), the filling in Zippo lighters, furnishings (e.g. bedspreads, bedsheets, blankets, window treatments, upholstery, slipcovers), industrial uses (e.g. medical surgery products, non-woven products, tire cord), and other uses (e.g. yarn, feminine hygiene products, diapers, towels). Rayon is a major feedstock in the production of carbon fiber. Nitrocellulose The fact that nitrocellulose is soluble in organic solvents such as ether and acetone, made it possible for Georges Audemars to develop the first "artificial silk" about 1855, but his method was impractical for commercial use. Commercial production started in 1891, but the result was flammable, and more expensive than acetate or cuprammonium rayon. Because of this, production was stopped before World War I, for example in 1912 in Germany. It was briefly known as "mother-in-law silk." Nathan Rosenstein invented the spunize process by which he turned rayon from a hard fiber to a fabric. This allowed rayon to become a popular raw material in textiles. Acetate method Paul Schützenberger discovered that cellulose can be reacted with acetic anhydride to form cellulose acetate. The triacetate is only soluble in chloroform making the method expensive. The discovery that hydrolyzed cellulose acetate is soluble in more polar solvents, like acetone, made production of cellulose acetate fibers cheap and efficient. Cuprammonium method The Swiss chemist Matthias Eduard Schweizer (1818-1860) discovered that tetraaminecopper dihydroxide could dissolve cellulose. Max Fremery and Johann Urban developed a method to produce carbon fibers for use in light bulbs in 1897. Production of rayon for textiles started in 1899 in the Vereinigte Glanzstoff Fabriken AG in Oberbruch. Improvement by the J. P. Bemberg AG in 1904 made the artificial silk a product comparable to real silk. Viscose method Finally, in 1894, English chemist Charles Frederick Cross, and his collaborators Edward John Bevan, and Clayton Beadle patented their artificial silk, which they named "viscose", because the reaction product of carbon disulfide and cellulose in basic conditions gave a highly viscous solution of xanthate. The first commercial viscose rayon was produced by the UK company Courtaulds Fibers in 1905. Avtex Fibers Incorporated began selling their formulation in the United States in 1910. The name "rayon" was adopted in 1924, with "viscose" being used for the viscous organic liquid used to make both rayon and cellophane. In Europe, though, the fabric itself became known as "viscose," which has been ruled an acceptable alternative term for rayon by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. The method is able to use wood (cellulose and lignin) as a source of cellulose while the other methods need lignin-free cellulose as starting material. This makes it cheaper and therefore it was used on a larger scale than the other methods. Contamination of the waste water by carbon disulfide, lignin and the xanthates made this process detrimental to the environment. Rayon was only produced as a filament fiber until the 1930s when it was discovered that broken waste rayon could be used in staple fiber. The physical properties of rayon were unchanged until the development of high-tenacity rayon in the 1940s. Further research and development led to the creation of high-wet-modulus rayon (HWM rayon) in the 1950s.[6] Research in the UK was centred on the government-funded British Rayon Research Association.