Types of non-woven fabrics and how they are processed

Different types of non-woven fabrics (An overview)

The non-woven materials can be split into 8 types according to diverse manufacturing methods:

Spunlace non-wovens

It is a non-woven fabric; it is the direct use of polymer pieces, tiny fibers, or filaments into a fiber grid by air or mechanical, acupuncture, or hot-rolled reinforcement, spun lace, and ultimately, after finishing the formation of spun lace, non-woven fabric.

It is well-known for medical non-woven fabric, facial mask fabric, wet wipe fabric, non-woven filter fabric, etc.

Heat-bonded non-woven fabrics AKA Thermal-bonded

This non-woven fabric is primarily manufactured in various processes: adding fibrous or moist mounting material into the fiber network and then backing the network into cloth via heating and cooling.

Thermal bonded non-woven fabrics products have properties that can vary from nonporous, thin, non-extensible, and nonabsorbent to open, bulk, extensible and absorbent. 

Wet-laid non-woven

The manufacturing procedure of wet non-woven fabric goes like this: spread the fibrous raw textile in the liquid medium into single fibers, meanwhile creating a fibrous suspension slurry by mixing different fiber raw materials, then moving the balanced slurry to a mesh-forming mechanism, and the threads are laid in a liquid state to form a cloth.

Airlaid technology is already used for everyday products such as napkins, diapers, tablecloths, sanitary napkins, meat packaging, wet wipes, etc. 

Pulp air-laid non-wovens

Air-laid non-wovens are also known as/called dustless paper or dry paper non-wovens. It utilizes the air-laid technology to spread the wood pulp fiberboard into a single fiber condition, then uses the airflow process to make the fiber agglomerate on the net curtain, and then shrinks the fiber web into cloth.

Acupuncture non-wovens

Acupuncture non-woven is a type of dried non-woven fabric. The soft fiber is backed into cloth by needle puncture.

Stitch non-wovens

Stitched non-woven is another type of dry non-woven fabric. The manufacturing procedure uses a warp interwoven loop structure to support the non-woven materials (such as plastic sheeting, plastic foil, etc.), fiber web, yarn layer, or a mixture thereof to form a non-woven fabric.

Meltblown non-wovens

Melt-blown non-woven fabric is manufactured by extruding melted polymer fiber via a linear dye containing several hundred tiny holes to create long thin threads, which are lengthened and chilled by passing hot air as they descend from the linear dye. The resulting web is blown onto a collector mesh, composing fine-filtered, self-bond non-wovens. Usually, this type of non-woven fabric is commonly added to spunbond to create SM or SMS webs.

Spunbond non-wovens

Spunbond-type of the non-woven fabric is processed as follows:

• Press and stretch the polymer to form a continuous filament.

• Lie the fiber strands into a web.

• Process the web into the non-woven fabric via their bonding, thermal bonding, chemical bonding, or mechanical mounting methods.

The products made from this fabric are PPE kits, air filtration cloths, liquid filtration equipment, and so on.