Acrylic polymer treatment on Nylon fibers improves color strength and durability in thermal transfer printing

Abstract

Digital inkjet printing technology includes fabric inkjet printing and thermal transfer printing. Fabric inkjet printing method has been applied to various materials such as cotton, nylon, silk, polyester, PE, PP, PU, etc. Thermal transfer printing has been applied to polyester or nylon that as resistant to heat by printing heat and pressure. In dying nylon using the thermal transfer printing technology, however, there has been an outstanding issue on a complete transfer of black ink to the nylon fabric; in particular, blue dye which is a component dye of a black ink is hardly fixed at nylon fabric. Here, we found that treating nylon fabrics with acrylic polymers enables a complete transfer of black inks without a loss of transfer of component dyes including blue dye, showing 11 % enhancement of color strength compared to that of the neat control. Moreover, we reveal that surface energy difference between polymer-coated nylon fabric and the ink is closely related to color strength and fastness of inks to the polymer-treated nylon fabric, demonstrating PMAe which has the closest surface energy to that of black ink shows the highest color strength (470) and fastness (average 4 grade). Our results may open a new avenue to dying nylon.