Enhancing the Opacity of the Modified Natural Thickening Agent with Different Metal Oxides for Covering Dark Dyed Fabrics.

Most natural thickeners do not have a full coverage degree when printing on dark dyed fabrics (brown/navy/black). Therefore, some materials are added to improve their coverage. It is common practice that printing is done on dyed or undyed fabrics. The dyed fabrics are of different shades, so the printing process faces a problem, as most of the natural thickeners do not have full coverage, especially those extracted from aloe vera and flax seeds when printing on fabrics dyed with dark colors. Therefore, in this study the effect of adding zinc oxide and titanium oxide to the printing paste was studied. The result confirmed that, adding metal salts to printing paste using aloe vera gel or flaxseeds gum as thickener increases the whiteness index of these pastes as well as the printed fabric. In addition, using light dye in these printing paste provides good covering of dark color with good appearance of the new light color used. Furthermore, the mechanical and physical characteristics of printed textiles with various thickeners and metal oxide (14 %) have been evaluated and provide improving both tensile strength and elongation at break and had no effect on the angle of crease recovery of printed textiles across all printing paste formulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]