Sustainable traditional grass cloth fiber dyeing using the Taguchi L16 (4^4) orthogonal design

Abstract For many centuries, traditional grass cloth has been used as an important raw material for home textiles in China, but its market can be expanded by incorporating color. Reactive Red 2 (R2), Reactive Blue 194 (B194), and Reactive Orange 5 (O5) were used in this work to explore the dyeing behavior of sustainable traditional grass fiber using industrial dyeing methods. Initially, an L16 (4^4) orthogonal design was schematically applied to carry out the dyeing process and it was determined that the total dye fixation rate (T%) of B194 dye was the best among the three dyes. Accordingly, a statistical Taguchi technique was analyzed on a larger scale to optimize the dyeing process parameters (salt concentration, fixation time, fixation temperature, and solution pH) of B194, in which solution pH was found to be the most influential factor in achieving the highest T%. This phenomenon was also verified using analysis of variance (ANOVA), where the solution pH was found to be the biggest contributor (50%) and statistically significant (p