Process
Mercerisation alters the chemical structure of the cotton fibre. The structure of the fibre inter-converts from alpha-cellulose to a thermodynamically more favourable beta-cellulose polymorph. Mercerising results in the swelling of the cell wall of the cotton fibre. This causes increase in the surface area and reflectance, and gives the fibre a softer feel. An optional last step in the process is passing the thread over an open flame; this incinerates stray fibers, improving the fabric's appearance. This is known as "gassing the thread" due to the gas burner that is typically used.
Read more about this topic: Mercerised Cotton
Famous quotes containing the word process:
“We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there’s a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry. ... poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.”
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“The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot foresee.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)