Application of Laser Technology in Clothing and Embroidery Industry

1. Development and current status of laser technology

Laser has the characteristics of monochromaticity, directionality, coherence, high brightness, etc. It is also a new strong light source. The development of laser technology has become an important factor affecting people's lives. Laser processing is an emerging field of laser technology application. It uses the energy of laser irradiation on the processed object to melt and vaporize the material in a short time. This method is used to perform non-contact high-speed cutting, hollowing, and cutting of raw materials such as clothing fabrics, trademarks, and leather. It is the trend of mechanical processing in the future clothing industry. Compared with traditional cutting methods, laser cutting is low in price and consumption; laser cutting effect, precision and cutting speed are very good, and it also has the characteristics of safe operation and simple maintenance. It can work continuously for 24 hours.

Since the early 1970s, when laser cutting technology was put into production and application, it has developed very rapidly and the technology has become more and more perfect. At present, industrially developed countries have widely used this technology.

Since the end of the last century and the beginning of this century, laser processing technology has gradually begun to be used in clothing production. Laser processing equipment has the characteristics of high degree of automation, high processing precision, fast speed, high efficiency, simple and convenient operation, and adapts to the international clothing production technology trend. In just a few years, laser cutting, laser marking, laser engraving, including clothing production design, clothing fabric processing, etc. have been recognized by the clothing industry. Through practice, the clothing industry has realized that laser processing has superior performance, which can not only increase the added value of clothing products, but also realize the upgrading of clothing processing methods. Therefore, laser processing technology and equipment are being promoted and popularized in the clothing industry at an astonishing speed.

2. Analysis of the process flow of clothing enterprises

Let's analyze the process flow of clothing enterprises: surface, auxiliary materials - surface, auxiliary materials cutting and processing (including embroidery) - clothing forming - sales. It is not difficult to see from here that the cutting of fabrics

is in the second position of the process flow, that is, the quality of fabric cutting will seriously affect the quality of clothing forming.

With the continuous improvement of people's living standards, people's aesthetic awareness and aesthetic concepts have also been significantly improved and strengthened. People have higher requirements for the workmanship of clothing, "clothing fashion", so the "edge-shaped" precise cutting of surface auxiliary materials has become a basic indicator of quality assurance before clothing forming. After the traditional clothing cutting process is completed, the first step is to make manual or mechanical pattern drawing, then manually cut the paper plate, and finally cut the pieces manually or with an electric cutter according to the paper plate. If the traditional method is used for cutting pieces, it does not matter if the cloth layer is thin and the number of pieces is small, but if a large number of clothing pieces are required, it is easy to have size errors or different shapes of the pieces, which cannot meet the needs of customers well.

Market competition is cruel, and quality and efficiency are particularly important to be invincible. Therefore, the speed of cutting fabrics in the clothing industry will obviously affect the subsequent processes and quality, thereby affecting market competitiveness.

3. Advantages of laser technology

Laser technology equipment has three major advantages in the application in the clothing industry: First, during the laser cutting process, the fabric will not be deformed or wrinkled, the cutting size is highly accurate, and the cutting shape can be changed arbitrarily according to the artwork, which increases the practicality and creativity of the design. In addition, laser cutting technology uses "light knife" instead of metal knife. Laser cutting any fabric can instantly melt and solidify the cut to achieve the function of automatic "locking edge". Traditional crafts use die cutting or heat processing, and the cut is easy to lose silk, turn yellow and harden, while laser cutting has a small gap, high accuracy, and can automatically "lock edge"; second, when laser engraving, laser engraving refers to connecting the laser equipment to the laser engraving software and inputting the artwork for automatic engraving. At present, laser engraving is the most mature and widely used technology in the field of laser processing. Using this technology, any complex graphics can be engraved. Hollow engraving and non-penetrating blind groove engraving can be performed, so as to engrave various magical patterns with different depths, different textures, layering and transitional color effects. With these advantages, laser engraving caters to the new trend of international clothing processing. The third is laser marking, which has the characteristics of high marking accuracy, fast speed and clear marking. Laser marking is compatible with the various advantages of laser cutting and engraving technology, and can also process small and complex patterns. Laser marking has anti-counterfeiting performance that never wears out.

4. Application of laser technology in clothing and embroidery industry

The application of laser technology in the clothing industry mainly depends on the design drawings of clothing designers. Clothing designers design the styles of clothing in a flat manner according to market trends, and then use AUTO-CAD, CORELDRAW, PHOTOSHOP, Wentai and other software to draw and store them in the corresponding file format. Open the laser control software and set parameters such as cutting speed. The software will convert the designed graphics into mechanical movement and light control to cut the required surface and auxiliary materials. Its working process is actually to use software to control the laser energy, the movement process and speed of the laser cutter head, and cut the surface and auxiliary materials. Compared with traditional manual cutting and original mechanical cutting, this laser cutting greatly improves its cutting accuracy and efficiency, reduces production costs, significantly improves product quality, and significantly increases economic benefits. Here, it is explained that the CO2 laser cutting machine of Jinan Weihua Laser generally uses RDworksV8 software and LaserCAD software.

1) Application in the clothing industry

In the aspect of ready-made clothing laser embroidery, more than two-thirds of textile and clothing fabrics can use laser to make various digital patterns. The traditional textile fabric production process requires post-processing such as grinding, hot stamping, and embossing, while laser burning has the advantages of convenient and fast production, flexible pattern change, clear image, strong three-dimensional sense, and can fully express the natural color texture of various fabrics, as well as long-lasting newness. If combined with the hollowing process, it is the finishing touch and complements each other. Clothing fabric and ready-made clothing laser cutting is suitable for: textile fabric finishing plants, fabric deep processing plants, ready-made clothing plants, surface accessories and incoming material processing enterprises.

In the aspect of denim image laser spraying, through CNC laser irradiation, the dye on the surface of the denim fabric is vaporized, so as to produce non-fading image patterns, gradient flower shapes, cat whisker frosting and other effects on various denim fabrics, adding new highlights to denim fashion. Denim spray laser processing is an emerging processing project with rich processing profits and market space. It is very suitable for denim clothing factories, washing plants, processing companies and individuals to carry out value-added deep processing of denim products.

In terms of laser marking of leather fabrics, laser technology is currently widely used in the shoemaking and leather industries. The advantage of laser is that it can quickly engrave and hollow out various patterns on various leather fabrics, and it is flexible in operation. At the same time, it will not cause any deformation of the leather surface to reflect the color and texture of the leather itself. It also has many advantages such as high engraving accuracy, hollowing without burrs, and arbitrary shape selection. It is suitable for the needs of processing manufacturers such as uppers, shoe materials, leather goods, handbags, luggage, leather clothes, etc.

2) Application in the embroidery industry

Laser cutting of patch embroidery: In the computer embroidery process, there are two important steps: cutting before patch embroidery and cutting of material after embroidery. In traditional processing technology, the defect of the die-cutting method used for cutting before embroidery is that it is easy to produce fabric fringes, and the processing accuracy is limited by the die-cutting method. It is difficult to process special-shaped graphics. The production cycle of the die-cutting method is long and the cost is high. When encountering small batch orders, the impact of the die-cutting method on the production cost will be more obvious, thus restricting the development of patch embroidery. Most of the cutting after embroidery is hot-cut, which has the disadvantages of large cutting gaps, yellow and hard edges, and difficulty in alignment. Special-shaped graphics rely on manual hand cutting, which is more likely to loosen the edges and produce waste, so there is an urgent need for an advanced processing method to replace these two old processing methods. Although laser processing is also a thermal processing method, due to the high focusing of the laser, the irradiation spot is fine, and the heat diffusion area is small, it is very suitable for cutting textile fiber fabrics. Specifically, it is manifested in a wide range of processed fabrics. The incision is smooth without burrs, automatic closing, no deformation, the graphics can be designed and output at will through the computer, and no die-cutting is required. This makes laser processing a recognized alternative method in the industry.

For a long time, there has been a problem of alignment in the trimming of trademarks, the trimming of embroidery patterns, and the punching of embroidery patterns. Accurate and efficient cutting is the common expectation of the industry. The existing automatic visual tracking cutting system has made a big step forward on the basis of traditional manual alignment cutting, and can automatically locate and cut according to the alignment points. However, the random deformation of textile products cannot be automatically corrected, so a large amount of waste will be generated. Now some companies in the industry have successfully developed an automatic recognition and edge-finding cutting system, which can automatically generate a cutting path based on the edge of the woven trademark graphic, and accurately use laser cutting along the edge. It can also automatically locate and cut and punch the pattern in the embroidery graphic, thus fundamentally solving the alignment problem. About this automatic recognition and edge-finding cutting system, you can check our website for product with name of Contour laser cuttier for printed fabrics with vision CCD camera.