LION-TEX · Innovative Industrial Process for printing Lenticular Images Directly on Textiles with Jetting Technology for safety (protective clothing) application

In Europe 16 Million workers operate in low visibility environments, including roadway construction personnel and vehicle operators, utility workers, survey crews, emergency responders, railway workers and accident site investigators, school crossing guards, parking and toll gate personnel, airport ground crews and law enforcement personnel directing traffic, parking service attendants, workers in warehouses with equipment traffic, shopping cart retrievers, sidewalk maintenance workers, and delivery vehicle drivers, to name a few. Statistics report that every year 6000 are injured by vehicles or human operated equipment, because of a lack of visibility, specially in night time operations. To address this issue and minimise accidents, the EU launched directives 89/656/EEC and 89/686/EEC, which oblige employers to make available high visibility clothes to their employees. State-of-the-Art solutions consist in applying reflective material stripes onto the garment surface. Lion-tex suggests an innovative product for high visibility garments, which exploits the lenticular effect. In the project three objectives are defined: first of all to develop a portfolio of innovative 3D lenticular effects, that will be exploited on 3D surfaces (like textiles) instead of flat substrates; second objective is to develop an industrial plotter for textiles that allows, all at once, the printing of interlaced images made of reflective and fluorescent ink and the deposition of resins through a jetting device for constructing the lenticular layer; finally a new set of high visibility garments will be prototyped, demonstrating not only the higher efficiency of this product in protection, but also the lower cost, with respect to the state of the art, for a stronger SMEs competitiveness.