Imagine sitting in a restaurant booth, squeezing some ketchup onto the french fries just delivered to your table. Somehow, the ketchup bottle goes "splat" and sends condiment flying onto your new, white cotton shirt.

Instead of flying into a rage over your ruined shirt, you remain calm, reach for a napkin and wipe the ketchup off. There's no stain, and the shirt is barely wet.

Technology developed by a University of Oklahoma chemistry professor could make it happen. Call it water-repellent, stain resistant "nano-cotton."

Edgar A. O'Rear, a Francis W. Winn Professor in the School of Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering, and Professor of Research in the Department of Dental Materials at the OU Health Sciences Center campus, developed a nanotechnology-based polymer coating that leaves cotton fabric soft and pliable yet resistant to stains.

So promising is the technology that O'Rear and James Wheeler, co-founder and executive director of The Entrepreneurship Center at OU's Michael F. Price College of Business, have created a business - WON Laboratories - to commercialize the process.

"You can wash it and dry it and wear it and wash it some more and dry it some more and get mud on it and get ink pen on it and it will come out," Wheeler said.

WON Laboratories uses a liquid to apply the polymers developed by O'Rear onto the fabric in a microscopically thin coating.

"It is on the order of the size of a human hair," O'Rear said of the thinness of the layer of polymers used in the WON Labs process. "They are very, very thin, maybe one-one-hundredths of the thickness of some other technologies they are applying as coatings to fabrics."

Wheeler contrasts the process with that used by a competitor, Teflon, a coating that was developed by the DuPont Corp. and which already is in use in some clothing lines.

"Teflon just kind of covers everything, where ours wraps around the fibers at a very, very, very thin (layer) to where it doesn't even affect the feel of the material," Wheeler said.

WON Labs is in the process of licensing the technology from OU, and patents are pending for the process developed by O'Rear.

Next on the agenda is a series of "benchmarking" tests for the industry organization, Cotton Inc., that will prove just how long-lasting and how waterproof the process is.

"The potential is just tremendous," said Jim Mason, executive director of the Oklahoma Nanotechnology Initiative, an industry organization working to develop nanotech-based companies in the state. "We're excited to see this developed right here in Oklahoma and would like to see the company actually develop the product in our state."

Certainly, the clothing market for which the so-called nano-cotton is being developed is gigantic. The U.S. clothing market is a $165 billion industry, Wheeler said.

"We've had conference calls with multibillion dollar companies - Liz Claiborne, Wal-Mart, Levi Strauss - who've all shown a tremendous amount of interest," Wheeler said. "We will either manufacture the materials for them, or we will license the process and work with their manufacturers. Every arrangement is going to be unique."

The fact that other companies already have entered the market doesn't deter Wheeler and O'Rear. They are confident their product will win wider acceptance because it doesn't alter the look and feel of the fabric.

Plus, it's what Wheeler called an expanding market, meaning that no one is taking away market share. And it won't be long until consumers demand their clothing be water repellent and stain resistant.

"Just as when you buy carpeting now, you fully expect it to be stain resistant," Wheeler said. "We think it will be a short time before you buy clothing and material and you fully expect it to be waterproof and stain proof."

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For further inquiries contact Stephanie Callaway.

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