Application of wool in medical textiles

摘要

In recent years medical textiles have been the focus of extensive research as advent of new fibres and traditional fibres and its blends reached new heights in their performance capabilities. Of specific interest are the topical wound dressings. These wound dressings traditionally give basic protection against further injury and infection. Advanced wound dressings not only protect the wound tissues but also provide antimicrobial properties, absorb blood and exudates and in addition, expedite wound healing. Often these dressings contain three or four layers of textile materials each facilitate different functions. Novel synthetic fibres as well as natural fibres have been studied to construct such ensembles. However, wool, the protein fibre available from sheep, has not been exploited for such applications since now although it possesses the maximum liquid absorption capacity (35% of its weight) of all natural fibres. This paper investigates application of wool in wound dressing materials and its performance as an absorbent core in multi-layer wound dressing composite. Wool was utilised in this composite as nonwoven and a new method for assessing the absorbency of wool was designed and standardised. The results show that wool can be successfully incorporated as a wound dressing component providing additional absorbency property.