Textile printing: A challenge for ink jet printing technology

For a few years, aside from the printing of carpets and banners, ink jet technology has been used successfully for printing textiles. Compared with the traditional textile printing process, the market share using ink jet technology is not yet very important. However, a market study(1) predicts a very strong growth within the next few years. What are the requirements that ink jet technology has to fulfill? The paper will describe the main demands and differences between the known ink jet print - mainly on papers and foils - and the textile print. Different fibers and applications of a textile print automatically demand different pretreatment and aftertreatment processes, and the use of special chemicals and dyes as well. Because of this complexity we can not expect one solution for the textile ink jet printing process. This will be the challenge for textile ink jet printing. The faster the solutions become available, the more quickly the predicted market growth Will be reached.