Direct to garment printing is expanding its presence on the textile market today due to the markets search for sustainability, print on demand, fast response, mass customization and inventory reduction. While this type of printing in terms of quality may be enough for the promotional market, brands are still struggling with both quality and performance of the DTG prints on natural fibers, especially on dark colors.<br/> This paper is focused on research of print quality of the digital direct to garment printing based on the fabric hairiness and pretreatment level, which are the main obstacles for quality and sustainable printing. <br/> Open End and Ring spun yarn types of the same count 30/1 Ne are chosen. They are knitted with the same knitting parameters (stitch length and gauge) and dyed on the same dying batch. Hairiness values coming from the yarn production and fabric dying process are respectively compared. Swatches with different opacity level (25%- 50%-75% and 100%) of CMYK are printed on all fabrics with and without White underbase. In addition the effect of 3 different amounts of pretreatment are added for evaluation. The research gives the comparison of values of L lightness value (for dark colored fabrics) and S saturation value on 10 different fabric types. <br/> The result showed that wet pretreatment processing on fabric treated with enzyme gives the best results based on L values on ring spun fabrics on both enzyme treated and untreated fabrics. Important finding is that there is a need for pretreatment optimization of Open Endfabrics while ring fabrics gave the same result on 3 different pretreatment amounts. This conclusion is valid for dark fabrics only, while there was found no significant difference for white fabrics both on ring spun and open end. <br/> The brushed fabric (which had the highest hairiness level) gave the poorest printing results (based on L and S values measurements) showing the negative effect of hairiness value to print quality. <br/>
Samir Sadikoglu, "Effect of Fabric Hairiness and Pretreatment on Quality of Digital DTG (Direct to Garment) Printing" in Proc. IS&T Printing for Fabrication: Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies (NIP35), 2019, pp 6 - 14, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2019.35.6