Transfer Printing and Cellulose Based substrates for modern Textile Printing

Digital printing technology is a technique that has been growing since the 1990s and has a high growth potential when it comes to using different ink types and transfer printing techniques. In comparison to screen printing, digital transfer printing techniques have shown to consume less ink and water and are therefore considered to be a more environmentally friendly alternative for textile printing. Therefore, a digital printing technique called sublimation transfer printing was studied in this thesis. In a sublimation transfer printing process, an image is printed on a paper and then the image is transferred to a textile by using heat and pressure. Suitable coating of the paper surface has shown to improve the printing properties on the paper and therefore the paper samples used in the thesis were coated with three different coating formulas. The coating formulas used in this thesis were polyvinyl alcohol (PVOH) of a type A, PVOH A with ground calcium carbonate (GCC) and PVOH type B with GCC. PVOH A has a higher degree of hydrolysis than PVOH B. Results showed that there was no significant difference between optical densities between textiles and paper samples of different coat weights and coating formulas. The colour bleeding and colour penetration decreased in the printed paper samples for PVOH A + GCC and PVOH B + GCC when the coat weight increased, and the porosity of the coating decreased to some extent. As a conclusion, paper samples coated with PVOH A + GCC with coat weights above 15 g/m2 showed to give the best properties since the colour bleeding was minimal in those printed coated paper samples