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US 5,082,578 AGranted
Fabric care compositions containing a polymeric fluorescent whitening agent
AssigneeLever Brothers Company, Division of Conopco, Inc.
InventorsMatthew E. Langer, Ferial Khorshahi, Michael P. Aronson, John F. Hessel
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
The present invention pertains to fabric detergent and fabric care compositions comprising a surfactant and a polymeric whitening agent which contains both a fluorescent portion and a hydrophilic portion. The use of these copolymers allows certain substrates, such as polyester or soiled cottons, to be brightened more readily then previously known.
Claims22
A fabric care composition comprising:
- (a) from about 1% to about 75% by weight of a surfactant selected from the group consisting of soap, nonionic surfactant, anionic surfactant, ampholytic surfactant, zwitterionic surfactant, cationic surfactant and mixtures thereof;
- and
- (b) a copolymer whitening agent having the formula ##STR6## wherein:
- R is a difunctional aryl group or a difunctional straight or branched alkyl chain having 4 to 16 carbons;
- R.sub.1 is hydrogen, an aliphatic group having 1 to 20 carbons, an aryl, an alkaryl, a secondary amine, an alkali metal sulfonate, an alkali metal carboxylate, an alkyl ether or a halogen atom;
- R.sub.2 is a straight or branch chain alkoxy group having 1 to 16 carbons, an aryloxy or a substituted aryloxy group;
- R.sub.3 is a straight or branch chain alkyl group having 1 to 16 carbons;
- and
- R.sub.4 is a difunctional fluorescent moiety;
- x is selected such that the difunctional hydrophobic group is present at 0-49 mol% of the composition mixture when the copolymer is polymerized;
- y is selected such that the R.sub.2 group is present at 0-45 mol% of the mixture;
- z is selected such that the (OR.sub.3).sub.n group is present at 5-45 mol% of the mixture wherein n is an integer between 2 and 200;
- and
- w is selected such that the R.sub.4 group is present at 1-50 mol% of the reaction mixture.
11 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.