What Is Dye Sublimation?

With the arrival of several new patterned webbing designs this week, some of you may be wondering about the process behind the product. So let's talk about sublimation.

Sublimation, if you were to check the dictionary, is the process of transforming a solid directly into a gas. You may remember from science class in school that there are three stages of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. As you apply heat to matter, it switches from one stage to another. A great example is water. Drop the temperature below 32 degrees Fahrenheit and the water becomes a solid: ice. Raise the temperature some and it passes into the next phase: liquid. Raise the temperature further to 212 degrees Fahrenheit and you get steam, a gas.

So sublimation bypasses the middle liquid step and goes directly from solid to gas. You can see this sometimes after an ice storm when a strong sun melts the ice directly into steam. In 1957 scientists discovered a series of chemical compounds that can be sublimated onto polyester, permanently dying the material as if it were tattooed. At that moment dye sublimation printing was born.

Now that our history lesson is over, how is dye sublimation actually achieved? First our graphic designers create a new pattern on the computer. This pattern is then printed onto a special printer called a dye sublimation printer. This printer uses colored inks and paper specifically designed to handle the stresses of the next stage of the process. The pattern is repeated over and over again on paper that is over a hundred feet long!

Next the paper is paired up with blank white polyester webbing. The paper and webbing are fed into a press with large rollers. These rollers hold the two close together while heating them up to over 356 degrees Fahrenheit. At such high temperatures and pressures the ink on the paper converts to a gas. This gas passes through the polyester webbing and becomes bonded at the molecular level, effectively dying the material permanently.

Finally we flip the webbing over and print it again on the other side. The webbing is rolled onto cardboard tubes and cut at specific lengths making it ready to sell.

Our patterned polyester webbings are perfect for applications where heavy wear and tear are expected. Thanks to the sublimation process, their pattern is much more resistant to fading and dulling of color. Expect to see more of these patterns show up in our store over the coming months!

If you want to learn more about the process of sublimation, check out the article on Wikipedia.