Pretreating Stains with Various Detergents

Overview

Does pretreating stains with various detergents help? How do different detergents affect different stains? For example how to get rid of grass stains? In everyday life we often find ourselves in annoying situations when textiles get dirty and it's hard to get them properly cleaned. Some detergents fail to remove the stains completely and some may be harmful for the textiles. Our goal was to find out if it is possible to help stain removal by using various pretreatment detergents. We started the research by cutting 35 squares out of lightly colored cotton sheet. Then we smeared the squares with seven typical stain causing substances blueberry, grass, coffee, cocoa powder, ash, mud and sunflower oil. Before washing the squares in mild detergent solution we pretreated one set of stained squares with plain water, one with hard soap, one with pine soap and one with gall soap. In the final stage, we compared the washing results between each other. We chose this kind of theme for this study because we wanted to find out something that could be useful in everyday life.

Competition history

• ISEF 2016 Energy: Sustainable Materials and Design · Entry CHEM045T

Resources

• ISEF abstract page ↗

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