CORRECT IDENTIFICATION OF PVC AND PU ARTIFICIAL LEATHER

There are certain differences in the scopes of PVC & PU application. In footwear, PVC leather is mostly used in the lining, non-weight bearing parts, or the production of children's shoes. While PU leather can be used for footwear upper materials or weight bearing parts. In terms of bags, PVC leather is more suitable. Because the objects in bags are neither able to give off heat unlike the feet in shoes, nor heavy as a person.

We generally named artificial leather or imitation leather for those ones made up of PVC and PU besides the natural leather. Both of PVC and PU are polyvinyl chloride, one of plastics, but not the same craft for these two kinds of products in production. During the production process of PVC leather, the first step is to heat the plastic particles until melt mixing into paste, then coating evenly on the backing of T/C knitted fabric as the standard requirement of thickness. Foaming in the stoves is the second step to reach the different requirements of softness for different products in different applications. After foaming, surface dealing at the same time includes dyeing, embossing, polishing, matting, backing grinding, etc. mainly as the actual product craft requirements.

The craft of PU leather is more complicated than PVC leather. Due to the backing of PU leather is canvas type PU with great tensile strength, which not only can be coated on the backing fabric but also cover it completely to reach the appearance effective of none backing existed. PU leather also has better physical properties than PVC leather include bending resistance, softness, tensile strength and air permeability. In surface dealing, the design of PVC leather is embossed by the mold. While for PU leather’s design, it’s made by the separation between the centrifugal paper and semi-product after cooling. Usually, the using number of centrifugal paper is only 4-5, but the lifetime of mold is much longer. That’s the reason why the cost of PU leather is almost double of PVC leather, some with special technical requirements even can reach 2-3 times more.

It’s easy to distinguish PU&PVC leathers relatively. For the thickness of backing fabric, PU leather is much thicker than PVC leather. Besides that, the hand feeling of PU leather is softer than PVC leather. After burning, the smell of PU leather is lighter than PVC leather.