Feature

Why does cotton feel 'cool'?

By , and 2009-09-01T00:00:00

students in lab

An investigation into the structure and properties of cellulose that make cotton clothes feel 'cool' provides a real context for undergraduate spectroscopy lab work

One of the first industrial processes to rely on adsorption was dyeing of cotton by synthetic dyes. Today the textile industry produces approximately 20 million tonnes of dyed cotton per year.1 We have used the context of cotton as a textile to make laboratory work in our undergraduate experimental spectroscopy course more interesting by challenging students to design an uv-vis experiment to answer the question 'why does cotton feel "cool"?'. 

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