To fashion designers, printing paste is paramount. Due to different fabric properties, different printing pastes made of different printing thickeners are needed. Without a well-chosen printing thickener, you cannot obtain a luxurious and comfortable softness in clothing. And dye laboratories could not contribute to the color-brilliancy designers require.

Printing thickener is a media to bring dyestuff into fabrics. This requires a good wash-off property of the printing thickener. In the end of the printing process all the printing thickeners should be gone, so as to meet with the softness of the textile you require, and to enhance the brilliancy of the colors and the sharpness of the design.

The swelling properties of printing thickeners enable dye laboratory managers to prepare print pastes with cold water. A well-chosen printing thickener also reduces unwanted machinery stops to a minimum. Its purity reduces the risk of clogging the screens during the printing process, and flow characteristics give optimal uniformity to the print, good fabric penetration makes sharp prints, thus it definitely saves your time, energy and money.

SEATEX® printing thickeners are based on renewable raw materials such as vegetable seeds, alginate from seaweeds, starch and etc.

Guar: Fruit, splits, gum

Tamarind: Fruit, kernel, gum

Alginate-rich seaweed

Guar

The guar pod is the fruit of an annual bush dependent on the yearly monsoon rains. The plant grows on the small peasant farms in the desert-like regions of India and Pakistan. After the beans have been threshed, the guar seeds are delivered to a split manufacturer. There, a thermo-mechanical process separates the endosperms (splits) from the germs and the husks. The germ (guar meal) is valued as a high-protein animal feed. Guar gum is manufactured from the splits in a milling process.

Guar seeds contain approximately 37% of galactomannan.

Tamarind

The tamarind pod is the fruit of the tamarind tree, which grows throughout the suptropical region. In India it grows in avenues or on plantations. The pulp of the fruit is used in Indian cooking. The seeds are dehusked by a thermo-mechanical process before being sorted by hand. They are then milled to produce tamarind gum.

As a polysaccharide, tamarind gum contains a galactoxyloglucan.

Sodium Alginate

In the cold waters of Bohai Sea and Yellow Sea off the coast of north-east and east China, alginate-rich seaweed is widely cultivated. After harvesting these seaweeds, alginate is extracted from them at the factory where the alginate is rinsed and washed, dissolved and diluted. Next, impurities are removed by screening and dried alginate is milled and further screened to the required degree of refinement.

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