Flocking fabrics can be seen everywhere in daily life – such as home products, car interiors, luggage, packaging materials, ready-to-wear and other heavy applications. In today’s United States and Europe, fashionable, sculptural and three-dimensional 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, Chinese people used glue to adhere natural fibers to the fabric. Now, nylon fluff is accurately planted on polyester cotton base cloth, creating a luxurious effect, soft and rich feel, and is also strong and durable. The use of high-quality acrylic flocking glue can meet the technical standards required by current flocking decorative fabrics.
What is flocking?
Flocking is an application of implanting fine fibers onto glue-coated surfaces. Flocking fibers widely used around the world are natural fibers and artificial fibers with fine shearing. Relying on established physics and chemistry principles and using modern technology to combine artificial fiber fluff, high-voltage static electricity, and polymer polymer glue, flocking fabric manufacturers are able to produce increasingly complex and unique products.
What are the main elements of flocking?
Flocking mainly consists of three major elements: base cloth, flocking glue and fluff.
Base cloth: mainly fabric and non-woven base cloth. The weight of fabric-shaped base cloth is usually between 65 and 200 grams per square meter. Knitted fabrics, twill and satin fabrics are often used to enhance the tear resistance of fabrics. A considerable number of flocking decorative cloths use 65/35 polyester cotton coarse cloth as the base cloth material. Some fabric-shaped base fabrics require pretreatment such as heat setting, slurrying, washing, calendering, wool burning, or pre-dyeing. Non-woven base fabrics are mainly used for industrial and decorative fabrics. The non-woven base cloth covers paper, plastic, sponge and rubber.
Flocking glue: It is divided into water-based and solvent-based. Due to its environmental protection advantages, water-based flocking glue is very popular in the Western flocking industry. Common flocking glues include acrylic resins, vinyl acetate (PVA), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), styrene butadiene (SBR), etc. Flocking glue must have the characteristics required by the finished fabric.
Special glue is required to be selected according to the personality required for the fabric. Acrylic flocking glue has good light fastness, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) flocking glue may provide ideal bonding to ethylene plastics, and polyurethane glue may be used to increase strength. The final success of the entire flocking system depends very much on flocking glue to bond them together.
Flue: The hand feel of the treated fleece is closely related to the fleece specifications and how to chop the filaments. Decorative fabrics and clothing fabrics often require the fleece to be cut finely to the required length to achieve a special surface texture effect. Currently, common types of fluff include viscose, cotton and nylon.
Why is flocking glue important?
The basic velvet flocking fabric was once popular in the market for a very long time, and now the demand has dropped significantly. Plain color and country print series have also been completedFor the past. What followed was the sculptural flocking fabric. At first, it is simply embossed, followed by more advanced airflow embossing. Later it evolved into printing flocking on plain flocking cloth. The process is to first produce plain flocking fabric, and then apply flocking glue to the front of the fabric in a flower shape. When passing through the flocking box the second time, the fluff will be planted on the flower shape coated with flocking glue. This process requires very precise use of glue on the first layer of flocking fabric and is a great test of the strength of the glue.
The international market requires high-quality and stable fabrics. Strongness and durability are the performance demanding on flocking decorative fabrics, as it is a bridge that plants fluff on the base cloth. Standard flocking decorative cloth wear-resistant tests are Wyzenbeek and Martindale. Other tests include Taber grinding wheel test and scratch test. More successful manufacturers will continue to use standard testing to ensure high quality requirements are met. The Western market has very high requirements for consistency in quality.
Plant breathability is another conventional requirement for flocking decorative fabrics. No one wants to sit on a breathable sofa. Breathability is closely related to the properties of the selected glue. The water-based foam coating glue has a porous structure, creating the possibility for fabric breathing. 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 flocking decorative fabrics and clothing fabrics.
The residual formaldehyde content of fabric is also one of the factors that need to be considered. Inferior glue will produce a lot of formaldehyde during the flocking production process and will remain on the fabric, posing hidden dangers to human health.
Other characteristics such as the fabric feel requirements – either hard or soft, flame retardant properties, solvent resistance, and water resistance can all be met by adjusting the flocking glue.
Noveon-Noveon Chemical, as a leading company in the production of flocking rubber in the United States, cooperates with companies in the flocking industry to develop new flocking rubber to meet the new challenges raised by the industry. The water-based flocking foam glue provided by Nouyu Chemical makes ready-to-use compound products to provide a convenient and fast user experience. When designing products, the above-described characteristics of the fabric can be combined together, while taking into account practical application methods, so that the ultimately exquisite, durable, rich layers of flocking fabrics with three-dimensional sense can be released.
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