What is Caustic Washing?
According to market demand and fashion garment industry does different types of wash. Caustic washing is one of them. Caustic wash is the new concept in the market trend. In case of caustic wash, pretreatment and printing of the garments fabric is little bit different than the normal process. Normally printing on fabric is done after treatment of grey fabric that is desizing, scouring and bleaching. But in case of caustic washing, printing is done on the fabric without pretreatment of the fabric. These fabrics are used to manufacture garments. Then the garments are subjected to caustic wash. During caustic wash 20%-30% pigment is washed out, as a result different color fading effect is produced in the garments.
In order to have caustic wash effect, we must start from printing of fabrics. Normally before we do printing on cotton fabrics, we must treat the raw fabric in boiling water with “Caustic” which is a chemical with corrosive nature, or strong cleaning power especially for grease. During this process, all the dirt, grease, fine particles of cotton seeds and all foreign materials are cleaned up leaving only the pure cotton fiber in the fabric for printing. When printing is done on this well cleaned fabric, the printing will stay clearly and securely on the fabric.
However, when we want to do caustic wash on garments, we just do the opposite of the above; before printing we do not clean the raw fabric with caustic treatment. We just apply the printing on the raw fabric so that about 30% of the printing done on the surface may eventually go away.
Finally, when garments are made of this fabric and ready for wash, we will wash them with caustic and hot water. At this time about 30% of the printing will be washed away together with the foreign materials, leaving about 70% of the printing on the fabric making the design or stripe nice and soft. This is the look we call “caustic wash”.
For caustic wash, the printing must bbe pigment print with binder and baking treatment to an extent that the color will stay on the fabric only fairly securely to coincide with the caustic wash to be done later. In this article I will explain flow chart of caustic wash process step by step that are given below.
Flow Chart of Caustic Washing:
Step 01: Desizing
Water is added (400 Lt)
↓
Garments are added
↓
Machine started running
↓
320 gm Detergent added
↓
320gm Caustic soda added
↓
Temperature raise to 60°C
↓
Time 20-60 minutes
↓
Drop the liquor
↓
Add water and cold wash
Step 02: Neutral Wash
Add water 300 lit
↓
Temperature cold
↓
Acetic acid 150gm added
↓
Time 5 minutes
Step 03: Softening
Water is added (400 Lt)
↓
Garments are added
↓
Machine started running
↓
240 gm Softener added
↓
200gm Acetic acid added
↓
160gm silicon softener added
↓
Temperature Cold
↓
Time 15 minutes
↓
Drop the liquor
↓
Unload garments on trolley
Step 04: Hydro Extracting
Load the garments on m/c
↓
R.P.M 700-900
↓
Time 3-5 minutes
↓
Unload the garments on trolley
Step 05: Drying
Load the garments on dryer machine
↓
Temp 60- 70°C
↓
Time 40-50 minutes
↓
Time 10-15 minutes for cold dry
↓
Unload the garments
↓
Quality checking
Step 06: Delivery
After drying garments go to quality section and check the garment, good quality garment will be delivery and Deep shade again rewash, other quality Garment rectify then delivery.
You may also like: Acid Washing Process of Denim Jeans
