Abstract

During processing leather retains the important properties due to the fibrous structure of the collagen of the hide, which is the main reason why the manufactured product has individual and unique properties as a material of wide application and high value. In this work, comparisons were made of leather treated with fatliquoring formulations both with and without hydrophobic properties, for automotive upholstery in order to verify their influence on the properties of such leather by analysis at the stages of wet-blue, semi-finished and finished. The influence of local withdrawal of the samples was investigated for three regions of leather in experiments performed in duplicate and for each process step. The modification of the structure was observed by analysis of the specific surface area by the BET method and from scanning electron microscopy images (SEM), and data of mechanical and chemical characteristics.