Textile Finishing
The fashion and textiles world depends not only on a continuous flow of patterns and styles, but just as much on properties and effects perfectly tailored to meet consumer tastes and garment functions.
Non-iron shirts, water-repellent raincoats, iridescent colors and soft woolen pullovers are all essential to our quality of life. And who can live without absorbent but soft and fluffy towels, or long-lasting color fastness? Improved characteristics such as flame resistance, dimensional stability, abrasion resistance and washing resistance / permanence play an important role for users.
WACKER supplies a range of products to help you to modify a given property to meet demanding customer requirements. With our understanding of global markets, refinements in all types of fabrics and weaving techniques, through to integrated system solutions - in WACKER, you have a strong partner at your side.
Besides first-class product properties and effects, WACKER’s silicones also ensure that the manufacturing process is as uniform, efficient and smooth running as possible. Defoamers play an important role here. WACKER offers products optimized to your issues and tailored to your needs.
The foaming that normally occurs during processing is reliably controlled or prevented with WACKER product defoamers. WACKER’s SILFOAM® products control the development of foam allowing processes to run smoothly. SILFOAM® antifoams are especially efficient here. While largely chemically unreactive, they ensure high production speeds.
Though wool is often considered to be rough on the skin, reactive silicones with SiOH and amino-functional groups give wool elastic properties, a pleasant soft hand feel and high-quality bulk.
Together with high stretch, good dimensional stability and an antipilling effect, silicones from WACKER also make wool fabrics pleasant to wear. Whether a scarf, pullover or hat, our silicone-based fabric softeners provide wool with a high-quality feel and a pleasantly soft hand feel.
Fluid, ADVALON®, VINNAPAS® and VINNOL® dispersions from WACKER improve the mechanical properties of textiles by stabilizing the warp and weft threads, and thereby increasing its yarn slippage resistance and dimensional stability. Dispersions from WACKER can be used with many different fiber types - both natural and synthetic.
A textile is perceived as higher quality, the more pleasant, supple and soft it feels. A supple, soft hand feel is therefore an important quality feature. When formulating traditional softeners, you can choose from a comprehensive range of highly functional amino fluids and micro and macroemulsions.
The WETSOFT® product line effectively combines soft hand and hydrophilic properties, making it ideal for, e.g., towels and other textiles in which water absorption plays an important role. Moreover, WACKER’s POWERSOFT® brand covers a wide range of traditional aminosilicone fluid emulsions in concentrated form for particular efficiency in your formulation.
Dirt and water repellency is among the most important finishing effects in the modern textiles industry. Silicones, with their key basic property of water repellency ensure hydrophobic effects. Together with special catalysts, you can selectively modify this property to suit your specific needs without impairing the breathability. WACKER’s silicones also offer good washability.
The ever-increasing production speeds mean that textile substrates are in contact with aqueous treatment liquors for much shorter times. This naturally calls for greater wetting and penetration power. Our special silicone wetting agents lower the surface tension of aqueous systems to approx. 20 mN/m. At the same time, the hydrophilic properties of the silicone emulsions improve the adhesion of coatings to textile substrates such as polyester and polypropylene. Another application is the use of glycol-modified silicones as wetting agents for synthetic fibers.
There are applications where fabrics have to deliver more mechanical resistance than the pure fiber can provide. Impregnation with the right VINNAPAS® binder can boost fabric stiffness to the level specified for your application.
If you demand rich colors, uniform color progressions and durable color intensity, you can rely on the corresponding WACKER products.
They make colors fresher and more intense. Plus, they have an anti-thermomigration effect, which noticeably reduces the thermomigration tendency of the disperse dyestuff used. The silicones also provide relatively inflexible fabrics, such as denim, with a soft hand feel at the end of the process.
When safety is an issue, WACKER dispersions are crucial. VINNOL® dispersions, due to their basic chemical structure, impart flame-resistant properties to textiles. Depending on the application and requirements,you can combine them with a wide variety of other additives in order to produce flame-resistant coatings that meet even the strict legal provisions.
Textiles coated with polymer dispersions improve the abrasion resistance and thereby increase their lifetime. In addition, VINNAPAS® dispersions, by self-crosslinking, make textiles water/washing resistant. Their hand feel can also be flexibly modified within wide limits, to suit the application.
VINNAPAS® and VINNOL® dispersions are heat sealable at high frequency, thereby making conversion easier; whether you manufacture wall coverings, upholstery or vertical blinds, WACKER dispersions help you realize your innovative marketing ideas.
