Flocked fabrics can be found everywhere in our daily lives – in home products, automotive interiors, bags, packaging materials, ready-to-wear clothing and many other applications. In today’s United States and Europe, fashionable, sculptural, and three-dimensional flower-shaped flocking fabrics have become the new favorite among home decorative fabrics. As an ancient craft, flocking can be traced back to China more than 3,000 years ago. At that time, the Chinese used glue to adhere natural fibers to fabrics. Today, nylon pile is precisely planted on polyester and cotton base fabrics, creating a luxurious effect, soft and rich feel, while being strong and durable. Using high-quality acrylic flocking glue can meet the current technical standards required for flocked decorative fabrics.
What is flocking?
Flocking is the application of implanting tiny fibers into a surface coated with glue. The flocking fibers widely used around the world are finely cut natural fibers and man-made fibers. Relying on established principles of physics and chemistry and using modern technology to combine man-made fiber fluff, high-voltage static electricity, and polymeric glue, flocked fabric manufacturers are able to produce increasingly complex and unique products.
What are the main elements of flocking?
Flocking is mainly composed of three major elements: base fabric, flocking glue and fluff.
Base fabric: There are mainly woven and non-woven base fabrics. The weight of the fabric base fabric is usually between 65 and 200 grams per square meter. Knitted fabrics, twills and satin fabrics are often used to increase the tear resistance of fabrics. A considerable number of flocking decorative fabrics use 65/35 polyester-cotton coarse cloth as the base fabric material. Some fabric-based fabrics will require some pre-treatment such as heat setting, desizing, washing, calendering, singeing, or pre-dying. Non-woven base fabrics are mainly used for industrial and decorative fabrics. Non-woven base fabrics cover paper, plastic, sponge and rubber.
Flocking glue: There are water-based and solvent-based glues. Water-based flocking glue is very popular in the Western flocking industry due to its advantages in environmental protection. Common flocking glues include acrylic resin, vinyl acetate (PVA), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), styrene butadiene (SBR), etc. The flocking glue must have the properties required for the finished fabric.
Special glue needs to be selected according to the personality that the fabric needs to express. Acrylic flocking glues have good light fastness, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) flocking glues may provide ideal adhesion to vinyl plastics, and polyurethane glues may be used to increase strength. The ultimate success of the entire flocking system relies heavily on the flocking glue to hold it together.
Fleece: The feel of the processed fluff is closely related to the fluff specification and how to chop the filament. Decorative fabrics and clothing fabrics often require the fluff to be cut to the required length to achieve special surface texture effects. Currently, the commonly used types of fluff include viscose, cotton and nylon.
Why is flocking glue important?
The basic velvet flocking fabric has been popular in the market for a very long time, but now the demand has dropped significantly. Solid colors and country print collections are also a thing of the past. What follows is a sculptural feelflocked fabric. At first, it was simple starvation embossing, followed by more advanced air flow embossing. Later it evolved into printing flocking on plain flocking cloth. The process flow is to first produce plain flocking fabric, and then apply flocking glue on the front of the fabric according to the flower shape. When it passes through the flocking box for the second time, the fluff will be planted on the flower shape coated with flocking glue. This process requires very precise application of glue on the first layer of flocked fabric and is a great test of the strength of the glue.
The international market requires high-quality and stable fabrics. Strength and durability are demanding properties for flocked decorative fabrics, because it is the bridge that plants the pile on the base fabric. Standard flocked decorative fabric abrasion tests include Wyzenbeek and Martindale. Other tests include Taber grinding wheel test and scratch test. The more successful manufacturers continue to use standard testing to ensure high quality requirements. Western markets have very high requirements for quality consistency.
Plant breathability is another common requirement for flocked decorative fabrics. No one wants to sit on a stuffy couch. Breathability has a lot to do with the properties of the glue chosen. The porous structure of the water-based foam coating glue creates the possibility for the fabric to breathe. Due to the widespread use of water-based foam coating glue in the United States and Europe, fabric breathability has become a standard requirement for flocked decorative fabrics and clothing fabrics.
The residual formaldehyde content of fabrics is also one of the factors that need to be considered. Inferior glue will produce a large amount of formaldehyde during the flocking production process and will remain on the fabric, posing hidden dangers to human health.
Other characteristics such as fabric hand feel requirements – hard or soft, flame retardant properties, solvent resistance, and water resistance can all be met by adjusting the flocking glue.
Noveon-Noveon Chemical, as the leading company in the production of flocking glue in the United States, cooperates with companies in the flocking industry to develop new flocking glue to meet the new challenges posed by the industry. The water-based flocking foam provided by Nouyu Chemical is made into ready-to-use compound products to provide a convenient and fast use experience. When designing the product, the required characteristics of the above fabrics can be combined, while taking into account the actual application method, so that the final flocking fabric with exquisite, durable, rich layers and three-dimensional effect can be produced.
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