Shorter-Process Low-Carbon Cleaner Digital Ink-Jet Printing of Polyester-Cotton Blend Fabric Using Self-Cured Core-Shell Color Microsphere with High Dyes Content

Abstract

The use of color microsphere (CMS) is an alternative to overcome the limitation of dye-based ink-jet inks in polyester-cotton (T/C) blend fabric and achieve low energy, water consumption and pollution discharge of textile digital ink-jet printing. In this work, we reported a novel self-cured core-shell CMS ink and ink-jet printing on T/C blend fabric without pretreatment and postprocess, where the core is the copolymerization of styrene (St) and highly soluble polymerizable dye (HSPD), and the shell is fluorosilicone-modified polyacrylate. Particularly, we proposed a model molecular structure of HSPD with a chromophore-polymerizable-solubilizer group, which exhibited a high solubility in monomer of St, greatly improving the color strength of the ink-jet printed T/C blend fabrics. Besides, it can be found that, when 3 wt% the crosslinking agent of St was introduced into the core, the K/S value of printed T/C blend fabrics was higher at 1.57 than that of samples without the crosslinking agent, resulting from the more absorption of visible light by a regular arrangement of microspheres on the surface of the T/C blend fabrics as evidenced in SEM images. More importantly, the fluorosilicone-modified CMS ink printed T/C blend fabric was hydrophobic and the water contact angle (WCA) was 150.1°, providing the excellent dry/wet rubbing fastness (grades 5 and 4), washing fastness (grade 4), hand feeling and air permeability, effectively preventing contamination from cola, milk, coffee and tea. Compared with the conventional dye-based ink-jet printing process, this CMS ink-jet printing process, without the process of sizing, steaming, and washing, reduced the consumption of time, water, electric energy, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 79.5%, 99.9%, 91.6%, and 91.6%, respectively. This work will provide an important model system for the modulation of CMS inks, improving the color depth and fastness, but also a guiding strategy for the development of the shorter-process low-carbon cleaner printing technology.

Keywords: Shorter-process cleaner ink-jet printing, CO2 emissions, Color microsphere, Blend fabric