From the Sector

AVK, the Federation of Reinforced Plastics, has once again awarded its Innovation Awards to a range of companies, institutes and their partners in 2022. Three innovative composites from each of the three categories Products & Applications, Processes & Methods and Research & Science were honoured during the JEC Forum for Germany, Austria and Switzerland in Augsburg at an award ceremony on 29 November 2022. A professional jury, composed of engineers, scientists and trade journalists, presented the awards for 2022 in three categories.

List of award winners in the three categories:
Products & Applications category
First place: LAMILUX Composites GmbH, Rehau, Germany: Lamilux Sunsation® – the new standard under the sun
Second place: Carbo-Link AG, Fehraltorf, Switzerland: CL RESTRAP – Reinforcement of concrete girders using flexible, prestressed CRP tapes
Third place: Borgers SE & Co. KGaA, Bocholt, Germany: blue label by Borgers ®

Innovative Processes & Methods category
First place: BaltiCo GmbH, Hohen Luckow, Germany: Rod laying technology as an additive manufacturing process
Second place: Schmidt & Heinzmann GmbH & Co. KG, Bruchsal, Germany: Pole Position, a positioning system for polarisation imaging
Third place: NETZSCH Process Intelligence GmbH, Selb, Germany: SensXPERT, process optimisation driven by material data to increase the efficiency of thermosets and fibre composites

Research & Science category
First place: Institute for Textile Machinery and High Performance Textiles at the Technical University of Dresden: Spherically curved fibre-reinforced plastic composite components made from near-net-shape fabrics
Second place: Leibniz-Institut für Verbundwerkstoffe GmbH, Kaiserslautern, Germany: HyKoPerm – a measurement system for an industry-specific characterisation of textile impregnation behaviour
Third place: Technical University of Munich, Chair of Carbon Composites: Manufacturing processes for a tension-strut-supported pressure vessel that can be adapted to suit a given space

The DiloGroup informs at Techtextil in Frankfurt (June 21 – 24, 2022) about new developments aimed at improving production technologies with a focus on needlefelts.

It becomes more evident that the textile industry comes into the focus of regulatory authorities who push respecting sustainability principles and who initiate a new body of laws. Hence all industrial sectors are requested to achieve savings in material and energy. The textile machine building, of course, plays an important role by seizing this initiative and offering solutions for fibre pulp recycling and reduction of energy, water and ancillaries. DiloGroup has made big efforts to meet these challenges together with a circle of partner companies. In this regard focal points of the development work are:

1. Intense Needling
   Needling per se is a mechanical production method with a high energy efficiency. For this reason, the development efforts of DiloGroup aim at producing nonwovens by “intense needling” instead of water entangling, even for light nonwovens made of fine fibres for the medical and hygiene sector with an area weight of 30 – 100 g/m². This would result in a reduction of the environmentally relevant production costs; per annum to about 1/3 to 1/5 of current.
   Despite the prospective advantages of the mechanical intense needling method over the hydrodynamical, water entanglement is at the moment the most important production method for low area weights and highest production capacity and is also offered by the DiloGroup as general contractor in cooperation with partner companies.
2. “Fibre Pulp Recycling”
   Fibrous material in nonwovens and particularly used clothes can be successfully recycled, if staple length can be conserved in the tearing process. In the classical tearing process, staple lengths are dramatically reduced and therefore these fibres can only be used as base material for inferior uses in thermal or acoustic insulation or in protective textiles, transportation or protective covers etc.
   When recycling textile waste in the context of the collection of used clothes, the so called “filament-saving” tearing using special tearing machines and methods must be used to produce fibres with longer staple lengths which can be fed to a nonwoven installation. Hence product characteristics can be better specified and controlled.
3. Additive nonwoven production
   The additive production method of the “3D-Lofter” is especially suited for automotive parts with differently distributed masses; but there may also be potential for increasing uses in the sector of apparel and shoe production.
4. “IsoFeed”-card feeding
   In the field of card feeding, the “IsoFeed” method offers great potential for a more homogeneous card feeding at the same time reducing the variation in cross-machine fibre mass distribution and thus the fibre consumption while conserving the end product quality.

Fibre Extrusion Technology Ltd, UK has completed the installation and commissioning of a new FET Laboratory Spunbond system for the University of Leeds.

This FET spunbond system is now an integral part of the research facilities of the CCTMIH (Clothworkers’ Centre for Textile Materials Innovation for Healthcare), led by Prof. Stephen Russell based in the School of Design, University of Leeds, who commented “The new spunbond system is perfectly suited to our academic research work, and is already proving itself to be extremely versatile and intuitive to use”.
 
This spunbond system complements existing research lab facilities at the university, which covers all areas of fibre and fabric processing, physical testing and characterisation. It forms part of a wider investment in facilities to support fundamental, academic research on ‘future manufacturing’ for medical devices, where the focus is on studying small-scale processing of unconventional polymers and additive mixes to form spunbond fabrics with multifunctional properties.
 
Key to this research is developing the underlying process-structure-performance relationships, based on the measured data, to provide detailed understanding of how final fabric performance can be controlled during processing.

As a rule, many exciting materials developed in academic research struggle to progress beyond the bench, because of compatibility issues with key manufacturing processes such as spunbond. By leveraging mono, core-sheath and island-in-the-sea bicomponent technology, the Leeds University team is working with polymer and biomaterial research scientists, engineers and clinicians to explore the incorporation of unusual materials in spunbond fabrics, potentially widening applications.
 
FET has built on its melt spinning expertise to develop a true laboratory scale spunbond system and is currently working on a number of other such projects globally with research institutions and manufacturers.