Surface physical-morphological and chemical changes leading to performance enhancement of atmospheric pressure plasma treated polyester fabrics for inkjet printing

Without any preprocessing, polyester fabric has lower ability to hold on water due to the smooth morphology and chemistry property of polyester fibers. Therefore, patterns directly printed with pigment inks have poor color yields and easily bleed. In this paper, atmospheric pressure plasma was used to pretreat polyester fabric in order to provide an active surface for the inkjet printing. The results showed that surface-modified polyester fabrics could obtain the effects of features with enhanced color yields and excellent pattern sharpness. SEM images indicated that the rough surface of plasma treated fibers could provide more capacities for the fabric to capture inks and also facilitate the penetration of colorant particles into the polyester fabric. XPS analysis revealed that air + 50%Ar plasma introduced more oxygen-containing groups onto the fabric surface than air plasma. Although AFM images indicated that etching effects generated by air plasma treatments were more evident, the air/Ar plasma treated sample has higher K/S value and better color performance. These studies have also shown that the chemical modification of plasma appears to be relatively more significant for improving the effect of inkjet printing.