Digital Textile Printing

The digital textile printing is a new form of the print (clear) textiles. The special thing about this type of textile printing is that no form of pressure is needed, what has raised some advantages, but also some drawbacks in the industrial production. Because no more templates must be made, a textile production can be faster than introduce into the analog process, so a time saver. Depending on the principle after the paints which material is used, is also possible to save it (water and energy savings) the omission of detergents and Fixierbadern costs, are made, hardly differs from the a standard digital printer. Here are the colors directly from the available process colours”mixed. The difference is in the amount of colors. Where a typical digital printer has only 4 colors (CMYK), 6 or more colors used for the digital textile printing, to enlarge the range of printable colors.

Many of the newer textile printer work with the primary colors: cyan, Magenta, yellow, black, light magenta and light cyan. However, even printers with up to 12 colours are not uncommon. Of course not the same inks used in digital textile printing, home found the paper printer. Depending on the material, the printer requires special ink. In the following we want to refer briefly three types of inks and their related materials.

Reactive inks are used especially for natural and so-called CEL regenerated fibres. Here a steam treatment and a sour after wash is required after printing. Acid inks are suitable for animal and some synthetic fibers. “Although as counterpart” the above reactive inks are known, they must as these are fixed with water vapor, need but then a basic (alkaline) laundry. Pigment-based inks used to print the pigments in the fibers. They are thus suitable for almost every fiber and tissue types that have a percentage of cotton. The pigments are ground very finely for the area of textile printing a uniform size to get. This has the positive effect that do not clog the nozzle in the pressure. Despite the enormous possibilities and savings of digital textile printing, there are some issues that must still be eradicated in this technique. Still being researched on this technique further, and soon that could replace the traditional textile printing.