Theoretically pigment inks are suitable for inkjet printing of all kinds of fiber fabrics, including polyester, silk, cotton, wool, etc. Besides that pigment inkjet printing has prominent environmental friendly advantages compared with other colorants. But pigment inks exhibit poorer color performance on fabrics than dye inks. Pretreatment of fabrics is one of the effective methods to improve the color performance of pigment inks. In this paper, an environmental friendly method – low temperature glow discharge plasma was employed to pretreat cotton fabrics and the image quality of cotton fabrics pretreated and inkjet-printed with pigment inks was analyzed. The results show that after plasma pretreatment the K/S values and L*a*b* of cotton fabrics were improved and, the ICC profiles and the color space of pigment inks on cotton fabrics before and after plasma treatment were calculated, which indicate the color performance of pigment inks was enhanced.
Anli Tian, Kuanjun Fang, Xia Zhang, Shaohai Fu, "Color Performance of Cotton Fabrics Pretreated by Low-Temperature Plasma and Inkjet-Printed with Pigment Inks" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies and Digital Fabrication (NIP25), 2009, pp 671 - 674, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2009.25.1.art00073_2