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

textile.technology blogger basic by Hasan
Technical or industrial textiles: 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.
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
floorcoverings
• 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.
The search for an all embracing term to describe these textiles is not confined to
the words ‘technical’ and ‘industrial’.Terms such as performance textiles, functional
textiles, engineered textiles and high-tech textiles are also all used in various
contexts, sometimes with a relatively specific meaning (performance textiles are
frequently used to describe the fabrics used in activity clothing), but more often
with little or no precise significance.