New prospects in pretreatment of cotton fabrics using microwave heating

•Pretreatment of grey cotton fabrics is carried out using microwave irradiation.•Fabrics properties after pretreatments depend on microwave power and time.•Complete fabric preparation is obtained in just five min under microwave heating.•Addition of urea improves the fabric properties and reduces pretreatment time.•Microwave heating is a promising green alternative tool for pretreatment cotton fabrics. As microwaves are known to give fast and rapid volume heating, the present study is undertaken to investigate the use of microwave heating for pretreatment cotton fabrics to reduce the pretreatment time, chemicals and water. The onset of the microwave heating technique on the physicochemical and performance properties of desized, scoured and bleached cotton fabric is elucidated and compared with those obtained on using conventional thermal heating. Combined one-step process for desizing, scouring and bleaching of cotton fabric under microwave heating was also investigated. The dual effect of adding urea, (as microwave absorber and hydrogen peroxide activator) has been exploiting to accelerate the pretreatment reaction of cotton fabric. DSC, FT-IR and SEM have been used to investigate the onset of microwave on the morphological and chemical change of cotton cellulose after pretreatment and bleaching under microwave heating. Results obtained show that, a complete fabric preparation was obtained in just 5min on using microwave in pretreatments process and the fabric properties were comparable to those obtained in traditional pretreatment process which requires 2.5–3h for completion.