Development of a digital printing technology demonstrator for the additive manufacturing of textiles

纺织品的生产通常涉及应用颜色，装饰或涂层。这些工艺目前使用湿化学方法，在生产过程中产生大量的废物。2008年全球纺织品产量估计为600亿公斤织物。这相当于10.74亿千瓦时的用电量或1.32亿立方米的煤和6 - 9万亿升的水。此外，时装业在织物和服装中产生了大量的浪费，这些织物和服装很快就“过时”了。这导致了零售商和制造商在未售出的时尚商品上的经济损失，以及大量不需要的纺织品的浪费。我们需要的是一种低成本，可靠的装饰织物的方法，可以用来经济地制造适量的时尚商品，更接近销售点-在我们的原型开发项目中，我们计划开发一种数字添加剂方法来扰乱市场-我们的商业机会是将数字印刷从小众技术转变为主流技术，用于使用传统材料进行染色、装饰和涂层的纺织品生产线。如果成功，这将创造一个工业印刷系统，使喷墨印刷行业能够应对时尚行业的巨大需求。如今，全球纺织品产量中只有不到1%是使用数字工艺印刷的。通过实现与传统方法相当的处理速度，但没有巨大的浪费和环境成本，我们预计我们的创新将使喷墨彩色连续进料纺织品打印机的硬件和油墨销售市场发生重大变化，到2018年价值将超过10亿英镑-同时将英国定位在数字纺织品印刷技术的最前沿。

The production of textiles usually involves applying colour, decoration or coating. Theseprocesses currently use wet chemistry methods that generate huge waste during manufacture.In 2008 global textile production was estimated at 60BN Kg of fabric. This equated to1,074BN kWh of electricity used or 132 million cubic metres of coal and between 6 – 9trillion litres of water.In addition, the fashion industry creates tremendous amounts of waste in fabrics and clothingthat go “out-of-fashion” rapidly. This results in financial losses for retailers and manufacturersin unsold fashion items as well as mountains of waste in unwanted textile goods.What’s needed is a low-cost, reliable method of decorating fabrics that can be used toeconomically manufacture the right quantity of fashion goods, closer to point-of-sale –without the huge environmental costs of current methods.In our prototype development project we plan to develop a digital additive method to disruptthe market - enabling process speeds close to current production methods at comparable cost.The business opportunity for us is to move digital printing from niche to mainstreamtechnology for textile production lines for dyeing, decorating and coating using traditionalmaterials.If successful, this will create an industrial printing system that enables the inkjet printerindustry to respond to tremendous demand in the fashion industry. Today, less than 1% ofglobal textile output is printed using digital processes. By achieving process speedscomparable to conventional methods, but without the tremendous waste and environmentalcosts, we expect our innovation to make a major step change to a market for hardware and inksales for inkjet colour continuous feed textile printers growing to over £1Bn in value by 2018– while positioning the UK at the forefront of digital textile printing technology.