Xerographic Toners for Textile Printing

Abstract

Fabric printing is a bottleneck in the textile-apparel supply pipeline. It is commonly believed that digital printing systems will replace the current methods of printing textiles. Xerography is one of the digital printing technologies being investigated for textile printing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The research reported in this paper has focused on developing polymerbased xerographic toners giving required printed fabric properties. The suitability of toners produced through mechanical grinding processes for xerographic textile printing is discussed. Three classes of polymeric binders (amorphous polyester, three thermosets, and five polyamides) were studied. The potential of these binders was evaluated using crockfastness (rub fastness) and fabric flexural rigidity tests. Materials that could be ground to the required particle size were too rigid. Thus the printed fabrics had high flexural rigidities and, in many cases, unacceptable wet crockfastness ratings. The potential of a more flexible resin, which could not be ground to the required particle size, was assessed by applying toners via a solvent medium. The flexible resin gave the required textile properties.