Abstract
Digital inkjet printing has been widely used in textile industry. The quality of dye solutions and ink-jet droplets limits the ink-jet printing performance, which is very important for obtaining high-quality ink-jet printing images on fabrics. In this paper, we introduced diethylene glycol (DEG) into the dye solutions of Reactive Blue 49 and Reactive Orange 13, respectively, and investigated the interaction between dye chromophores and DEG molecules. Results indicated that the dye chromophores were featured in the aggregation. Adding DEG into the dye solution could effectively disaggregate clusters of reactive dyes, and eliminate satellite ink droplets, thus improving the resolution of the ink-jet printing image on fabrics. Under the same DEG concentration, the disaggregation effect was more obvious in Orange 13 than in Reactive Blue 49. Higher DEG concentration was required in Reactive Orange 13 solution for creating complete and stable ink drops. The surface tension and viscosity of the dye solutions were measured, and printing performance on cotton fabrics was evaluated. The interaction mechanism between dye chromophores and DEG molecules was also investigated. Results from this work are useful for high-quality ink-jet printing images on fabrics.
Highlights
Digital ink-jet printing technology has been applied in many fields because of its incomparable advantages, such as low cost, facility, celerity, and ecofriendliness [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
The two main peaks in the visible region came from the dye Figure 2 shows the absorption spectra of the Blue 49 and Orange 13 dye solutions with different monomer and aggregation absorption, respectively, while longer wavelength peak λ2 belonged to concentrations of diethylene glycol (DEG)
After adding monomer and aggregation absorption, respectively, while longer wavelength peak λ2 belonged to DEG into the dye solutions, the two main peaks of both dye solutions increased, which meant that monomer absorption, and shorter peak λ1 came from aggregation absorption [33,35]
Summary
Digital ink-jet printing technology has been applied in many fields because of its incomparable advantages, such as low cost, facility, celerity, and ecofriendliness [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Reactive dyes are widely used for cotton-fabric dyeing in ink-jet printing techniques due to their bright color, excellent performance, and good applicability [2,11,12,13,14,15]. Too much aggregation may result in dye crystallization and precipitation, which leads to nozzle blockage during the ink-jet printing process [18,19]. This phenomenon is a major obstacle for ink-jet printing uniform images. Poor ink-jet droplet formation, such as satellite droplets, is a serious problem that reduces the resolution of printed images [25,26,27]
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