Definition and scope of technical textiles?

The definition of technical textiles adopted by the authoritative Textile Terms and Definitions, published by the Textile Institute1, is ‘textile materials and products manufactured primarily for their technical and performance properties rather than their aesthetic or decorative characteristics’.

Such a brief description clearly leaves considerable scope for interpretation,especially when an increasing number of textile products are combining both performance and decorative properties and functions in equal measure. Examples are flame retardant furnishings and ‘breathable’ leisurewear. Indeed, no two published sources, industry bodies or statistical organizations ever seem to adopt precisely the same approach when it comes to describing and categorizing specific products and applications as technical textiles.

It is perhaps not surprising that any attempt to define too closely and too rigidly the scope and content of technical textiles and their markets is doomed to failure. In what is one of the most dynamic and broad ranging areas of modern textiles, materials, processes, products and applications are all changing too rapidly to define and document. There are even important linguistic and cultural perceptions of what constitutes a technical textile from geographical region to region in what is now a global industry and marketplace.

Technical or industrial textiles: what’s in a name?

For many years, the term ‘industrial textiles’ was widely used to encompass all textile products other than those intended for apparel, household and furnishing end-uses. It is a description still more widely favoured in the USA than in Europe and elsewhere (see, for example, the Wellington Sears Handbook of Industrial Textiles).

This usage has seemed increasingly inappropriate in the face of developing applications of textiles for medical, hygiene, sporting, transportation, construction, agricultural and many other clearly non-industrial purposes. Industrial textiles are now more often viewed as a subgroup of a wider category of technical textiles, referring specifically to those textile products used in the course of manufacturing operations (such as filters, machine clothing, conveyor belts, abrasive substrates etc.) or which are incorporated into other industrial products (such as electrical components and cables, flexible seals and diaphragms, or acoustic and thermal insulation for domestic and industrial appliances).

If this revised definition of industrial textiles is still far from satisfactory, then the problems of finding a coherent and universally acceptable description and classification of the scope of technical textiles are even greater. Several schemes have been proposed. For example, the leading international trade exhibition for technical textiles, Techtextil (organised biennially since the late 1980s by Messe Frankfurt in Germany and also in Osaka, Japan), defines 12 main application areas (of which textiles for industrial applications represent only one group):

• agrotech: agriculture, aquaculture, horticulture and forestry

• buildtech: building and construction

• clothtech: technical components of footwear and clothing

• geotech: geotextiles and civil engineering

•hometech: technical components of furniture, household textiles and floor coverings

• indutech: filtration, conveying, cleaning and other industrial uses

• medtech: hygiene and medical

• mobiltech: automobiles, shipping, railways and aerospace

• oekotech: environmental protection

• packtech: packaging

• protech: personal and property protection

• sporttech: sport and leisure.

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