Non Woven Fabrics

Nonwoven fabrics are made out of fibres, without any restriction, but not necessarily from fibres. These
can be very short fibres of a few millimetres length as in the wetlaid process; these can be “ordinary” fibres, as used in the traditional textile industry, or then very long filaments etc. Properties and characteristics of a nonwoven fabric de-pend for a large part from the type of fibre it is ultimately made of. These fibres can be natural or man-made, organic or inorganic; the characteristic of a fibre being that it is longer than its thickness, or diameter. Such fibres can also be pro-duced continuously in connection with the nonwoven process itself and then cut to length, or then extruded directly e.g. from polymer granules into a filament and then fibrous structure.are neither woven fabrics, nor such other textiles as knitted fabrics. Behind these statements lies a fundamental characteristic of nonwoven: contrary to woven or knitted fabrics, fibres that ultimately make up the nonwoven fabric need not to go through the
preparatory/transitory stage of yarn spinning in order to be transformed into a web of a certain pattern.

Non woven manufacturing processes

There are three main routes to web forming

• the drylaid system with carding or airlaying as a way to form the web;
• the wetlaid system;
• the polymer-based system, which includes spunlaying (spunbonding) or specialized technologies like meltblown, or flashspun fabrics etc.