Performance Enhancement of the Digital Printed Cotton Fabric through Ecofriendly Finishes

Digital textile printing has emerged as a sustainable alternative to the conventional screen printing. Similar to other forms of coloration, digitally printed cotton fabric also needs finishing to overcome the inherent drawbacks of the cotton fabric. However, research on the finishing of the digital printed fabric is very limited and focused on non-sustainable finishes. In the first instance, this paper optimizes the recipe of the pre-printing process. Then, this paper investigates the performance of the digitally printed cotton fabric using three sustainable and formaldehyde free cross-linkers, three different softeners, C8-free oil and water repellent, and halogen free flame-retardant. This study applies these finishes on the steamed and non-steamed digitally printed fabric samples. The paper tests the performance of the finished digitally printed fabric in terms of key finishing properties. The results show that the proposed sustainable finishes have significantly improved the performance of the digitally printed fabric as compared to the reference non-finished digitally printed sample.