Printing cationized cotton with direct dyes

This paper investigates improved direct dye printing of cotton by cationization. For the cationization, a 100% cotton woven fabric is pretreated with 2,3-epoxypropyltrimethyl ammonium chloride by a cold pad-batch method. All printing conditions are constant, and four different direct dyes are used to print both unmodified and cationized cotton fabrics. The effects of cationic reagent concentration, steaming time, dye concentration, color yields, colorimetric properties, fastness properties, staining of the white ground, and penetration behavior are evaluated. This research reveals that printing with direct dyes on cationic cotton is a very simple, cost effective printing method with high wet fastness properties.