Dye-transfer Printing Systems Relying on the Use of Substrate Pre-treatment

The process for the pretreatment of synthetic polymer fibres for transfer printing described enables full, bright colours to be produced on fabrics composed of synthetic-cellulosic fibre blends (mainly polyester-cotton) and even on all-cotton; it requires a pretreatment of the fabric with a resin formulation, which can usually be applied on conventional resin finishing equipment. Investigations have shown that some amino resins did accept dyes of the disperse type, and did produce acceptable prints, but it was generally found that the fastness properties of most were poor and the results comparable with that of acrylic, resin-treated fabrics. Further investigations led to the identification of the resin structure giving the best fastness properties, but, at the same time when using conventional papers, even with the right resin, these fastness properties varied from dye to dye.

DW Heywood & DS Lambert, JSDC , May 1977, 195-197