Printable waterproof and breathable composite PVA coating on PE flash spun fabric via corona treatment for medical packaging

Polyethylene flash-spun nonwoven is widely used in medical packaging due to its excellent mechanical properties, light weight, and breathability. However, its surface energy is inherently low, and it has a porous structure of stacked ultrafine fibers. These features result in poor printing precision for water-based inks. Conventional coatings often compromise breathability, rendering the material unsuitable for medical sterilization processes. This study proposes a synergistic modification strategy combining corona pretreatment and a PTCC (PVA/TiO₂/CA/CMC-Na) multifunctional coating to produce PE-PTCC flash-spun nonwoven. The results indicate that mild corona treatment effectively etches the fiber surface, significantly enhancing the wettability of the PE nonwoven, with the water contact angle decreasing sharply from 154.1° to 52.3°. The PTCC coating successfully constructs a continuous and dense covering layer that effectively fills the larger interfiber pores while preserving a microporous structure, achieving an air permeability of 23.6 mm s −1 and maintaining good breathability without sacrificing water resistance. The resulting PE-PTCC nonwoven exhibits markedly improved printing performance, including enhanced precision for 0.2 mm line widths, uniform pigment dispersion, sharp line edges, and a low color difference (ΔE = 1.06). Furthermore, the tensile strength in both longitudinal and horizontal directions is enhanced to 35.2 MPa and 30.5 MPa, respectively, demonstrating improved comprehensive mechanical properties while maintaining suitable water vapor transmission for sterilization packaging. This study resolves the critical issues of insufficient wettability and ink bleeding that hinder high-precision printing on PE flash-spun nonwovens, thereby broadening their application prospects in the high-end medical packaging field.