Kenji Tomihara President Shanghai Daxiang Chemical Industry Co., Ltd. Overseas Department Senka Corporation

Pile fabric, which has a solid configuration, is often used for bedding (e.g. acrylic Mayer blankets, cotton blankets, towels), furnishings, such as carpets and doormats, and car-seats etc. It is not only used for plain dyeing but is often used in printing as well.

Pile refers to nap which is soft, fine hair and can be applied on one side or both sides of pile fabric.

				Velveteen
		Weft pile fabric
				Corduroy
Pile fabric
				Toweling
		Warp pile fabric
				Moquette

In printing pile fabric, firstly, it is necessary to let the color paste penetrate into the roots of the pile. Secondly, designs should be expressed precisely as a motif on the surface of the pile fabric, and as a result the print quality rises. For light weight fabric, it is commonly said that printing highly defined motifs is more important than achieving penetration, however, pile fabric is sosolid in its configuration that more attention is paid to the way color paste should be made to penetrate into the roots of the pile. To achieve such a successful penetration, the following procedures are recommended: reducing the viscosity of color paste as low as the level at which printing can still be carried out, increasing squeegee-ing pressure by using screens with a large opening-area ratio. These methods are considered ineffective on other general materials since sharp motifs cannot be obtained with those procedures (sharpness and penetration are inversely related). In the case of pile fabric, the saturation amount of color paste gets larger, therefore, sharpness is not as important as it is in lightweight fabric, and motifs which fit the shapes and lengths of the pile are used. Thus, for pile fabric, procedures are arranged in consideration of penetration printing. (Figure 1)

Figure1  Penetration of color paste on weft pile fabric