I’ve always been curious how a tiny piece of fabric is capable of removing all the static from your dried clothes. Thanks 🙂
In: Chemistry
If you touch a dryer sheet, you’ll notice it’s oily or tacky, and basically it’s fabric softener spread on a sheet. The sticky feeling is from a surfactant. The word “surfactant” comes from “surface active agent”. They have molecules that attract and stick to both oils and water.
Surfactants are useful in detergents (they stick to oils and let them get rinsed away) and in salad dressings (they keep the oil and vinegar from separating).
Laundry detergent uses surfactants to do the cleaning. These are usually “anionic” surfactants, which means the water-liking side has a negative charge. These are great at pulling dirt and oils out of fabric and then forming a little cluster, making sure the oily dirt stays suspended in the water in a little bubble. This prevents your clothes from getting dirty in the laundry water.
A dryer sheet in your laundry spreads another kind of surfactant all through your clothes.
The surfactant used in dryer sheets has a positive electrical charge on the water-liking end, it is “cationic”, so it sticks to negatively charged clothing fibers like a magnet. It cancels out static electricity from the fabric rubbing together. It also adds a layer of oil to the outside so the fabric doesn’t easily rub together well enough to build up any more static charge.
The water-liking side sticks to your clothing fibers and the other oil-liking end points outward. The dryer sheet also contains a lot of oil or silicone to coat your clothes and make them feel really soft.
Because each molecule has a positive charge sticking outward, the fibers repel one another and feel extra fluffy when they’re dry.
So first of all, what is static? It’s a buildup of charge that causes our clothes to stick to us.
To get rid of that charge we need to balance it out with something charged the opposite of it.
Dryer sheets are coated with a material that is charged oppositely when heated to negate the charge of the clothes.
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