A sorbent textile yarn was developed as a potential answer to the need for comfortable and durable chemical protective clothing. The yarn was prepared with an activated carbon slurry in triethylene glycol and a blend of polypropylene and wax. These are pumped and metered in separate streams into a 12-hole hollow needle-in-orifice-type multifilament hollow fiber spinneret. The extruded hollow filament with the blend as the walls and the slurry as the core is spun down a 15-foot cooling stack and taken up conventionally with about 100:1 spin draw ratio or greater. Permeability rate through the walls of the filaments is 3000 g/sq. m./day for water vapor and much higher for carbon tetrachloride and methanol. Absorption capacity of the yarns for carbon tetrachloride is generally about 40%. In a dynamic flow test where the yarns were arranged on a screen and there were many open areas between yarns, the capacity for dimethoxymethyl phosphonate (DMMP) was 0.253 g/g of yarn. This represents 50% or more of the DMMP to which the yarn was exposed. Exposure time was 60 to 70 minutes. These data show the high potential of the yarn for conversion into a textile fabric for use in chemical protective clothing.
