KAVITHA RAJAN

 Nonwoven manufacture starts by the arrangement of

fibres in a sheet or web. The fibres can be staple fibres
packed in bales, or filaments extruded from molten
polymer granules.There are several ways to form the
web. It can be done in term of mechanical, chemical
,and thermal
 Increasing the web mass
 Increasing the web width
 Determining the web strength in the length and cross
directions
 Improving the end product quality
 Staple fibers are shipped to the manufacturer in the form of bales and
fiber preparation consists of mechanical and pneumatic processes of
handling from the bale to the point where the fiber is introduced into
the web-forming machine. The following processes are included in a
typical fiber preparation line:
 Bale opening
 The bales are unstrapped and placed side-by-side in line with the
milling head of a bale opener. The fibers are picked up from the top of
the bales by two opening rolls in conjunction with a partial air vacuum.
 The opening head traverses back and forth across the bale lay down,
starting and stopping on demand from the blending hopper. This
ensures maximum efficiency and blending.
 The objective of an opening line is to reduce the size of fiber tufts from
the bale to the chute feed, which supplies the web forming machine.
 Blending
 The blending feeders gently open the tufts of fibers by
the interaction of an inclined needle lattice apron and
an evener roller equipped with needles.
 Blending of the tufts from different bales also takes
place in the opening and mixing achieved by the
inclined apron and the evener roller. The opened tufts
are deposited into a weigh pan controlled by load cells
which dump the fibers onto a feed conveyor.
Coarse opening
 The blending conveyor feeds fiber into an opening roll,
which has a three-lag pin beater where coarse opening of
the fiber tufts takes place.
Fine opening
 The fiber opened by the opening roll is transported by air
to the feed box of the fine opener. The fine opener consists
of two opening rolls, one evener roll and a cylinder roll all
of which are wound with metallic clothing. The opener
reduces the tuft size by using the principle of carding
points between rolls A and B and between rolls B and C.
The reduced tufts are transferred to the cylinder roll D
which delivers the opened fiber into an air stream to the
web-former.
Web-former feeding
 The feed system to the web-forming machine is
selected based on the type of fiber and the type of
web-former. Chute feeding is normally used to feed
fibers up to 60 millimeters in length. For longer fibers,
a hopper feed with a shaker-type chute is used.
 Fibers must be placed in a loose sheet structure called web
forming. There are three web forming processes: dry
laid,wet laid, and melt spun.
 Formation of drylaid nonwovens
 The nonwoven technologies originating from the textile
industry manipulate fibres in the dry state. The fibres are
carded or aerodynamically formed and then bonded
 by a number of methods – needlepunching,
hermobonding, chemical bonding,hydroentanglement, etc.
The first drylaid systems owed much to the basic wool
 felting process known since medieval times.
 The main objective of carding is to separate entangled tufts
of fibres from bales and to deliver the individual fibres in
the form of a web. The principle of carding is mechanical
action, in which the fibres are held by one surface while
another combs them out.
 At the centre of the card is a large rotating metallic cylinder
covered with needles, wire or fine metallic teeth, generally
referred to as the ‘card clothing’. The cylinder is partly
surrounded by an endless belt of a large number of narrow,
cast iron flats positioned along the top of the cylinder.
 The fibres are fed by a chute or hopper and condensed into
a lap or batting. This is initially opened into small tufts by a
licker-in, which feeds the fibres to the cylinder.
 The teeth of the two opposing surfaces of the cylinder
and flats, or the rollers, are inclined in opposite
directions and move at different speeds.
 The main cylinder moves faster than the flats, and due
to the opposing barbs and difference in speeds, the
fibre clumps are pulled and teased apart. In the roller-
top card the separation occurs between the worker
roller and the cylinder. The stripping roller strips the
larger tufts and deposits them back on the cylinder.
The fibres are aligned in the machine direction and
form a coherent web below the surface of the needles
of the main cylinder.
 The fibres in the airlaid process are also manipulated
in their dry state – although the origins of the process
are from the papermaking industry and air is the key
factor. The invention of the airlaid process is attributed
to Karl Krøyer in Denmark during the 1960s, who sold
the technology to the company M&J Fibertech at the
beginning of the 1980s.
 For over twenty years, virtually all commercial airlaid
technology was manufactured in Denmark by the
companies Dan-Web and M&J,until the latter was
acquired by Oerlikon Neumag in 2004.
 At present the leading manufacturers of airlaid nonwovens
include Buckeye Technologies, Concert Industries and Georgia-
Pacific. Other key nonwovens manufacturers with airlaid
manufacturing capacities include Kimberly-Clark, Fiberweb and
Johns Manville.
 Airlaying involves three key steps: fibre defibration, web
formation and web bonding. In the defibration process, fluff
pulp is delivered in a highly compressed roll that has a
cardboard-like feel.
 The rolls are fed into hammermills that have a series of small
hammers that rotate at high speed, separating the pulp into
individual loose fibres. The fibres are then transported to the
web forming system and at the same time staple fibres are fed
from bales into opening systems that loosen and separate the
individual fibres.
 There are two main forming technologies used to
produce airlaid webs. With the first, the fluff pulp and
staple fibres are sifted through a coarse screen and
deposited with the aid of a vacuum onto a forming
wire below it. The second system employs formers –
the fibres pass through a series of holes or slots in a
large cylinder that spans the width of the forming
wire. With both technologies, the pulp sheet is kept in
place by a vacuum system located below the forming
wire, and additives, such as superabsorbent polymers
or odour control powders, can be incorporated.
 Production lines generally have more than one web
former to allow for flexibility in the web formation and
increase line throughput. The technology often allows
for the web composition and structure to be controlled
to achieve various required functions.
 Prior to bonding, the web is compacted by large rollers
to provide some integrity and cohesiveness.
 It can also be embossed with a design or logo.There are
three primary airlaid bonding technologies – latex,
thermal and hydrogen bonding.
 The term multi-bonding is used when more than one
of the technologies are used in combination –
generally latex and thermal bonding.
 With thermal bonding the web must contain synthetic
bonding fibres – generally bicomponents of
polyethylene and polypropylene. Hydrogen bonding
exploits the ability of cellulose fibres to bond together
when naturally occurring moisture contained in them
is removed while the fibres are in close contact.
 The bonding is usually accomplished under
conditions of high temperature and pressure. This
process eliminates the need for synthetic binders to be
added to the airlaid web.
 The use of machine groups which resemble or are
similar to papermaking machines in the sectors
ranging from material preparation to batching shows
that,because of the close relationship in their
manufacture and the end product, their external
appearance and composition, these wet-laid web
products can be designated as much as webs as ‘long-
fibre paper’.
 The concept ‘filter paper’ is frequently used in practice.
 The manufacturing of nonwovens by the wet lay
method is derived from papermaking.
 The following stages in the process are typical:
 – dispersion of fibres in water
 – continuous web forming on a wire cloth through
filtration
 – consolidation, drying and batching up the web
 There are three characteristic stages in the manufacture of
nonwovens by the wetlaid method:
swelling and dispersion of the fibre in water and transport
of the suspension on a ontinuous travelling screen;•
continuous web formation on the screen by filtration;
• drying and bonding of the web.
 An example of the most recent wetlaid nonwovens
technology is the Hydroformer developed by Voith in
Germany. The Hydroformer belongs to the group of
inclined-wire formers where the headbox and sheet-
forming zone are a single unit.
 The converging nozzle consists of an upper front wall and a
lower dewatering box through which the forming wire
passes.
 The nonwoven web is formed continuously on the wire
above the dewatering box from a suspension of
uniform stock consistency. A 5.2-metre-wide
Hydroformer system has a maximum production
speed of 400 m/min and the throughput of the white-
water (clean water) circuit is a staggering 300,000
litres per minute.
 Inclining the forming wire and suction boxes to an
angle of 5° to 30° effectively expands the forming area,
which in turn decreases the flow requirements for web
formation and increases drainage.
 The web formation phase of the wetlaid process occurs
between the headbox and the forming wire. In this area,
the fibres are suspended in a diluted water slurry and
deposited on a moving screen that permits the water to
pass through the screen, and the fibres to collect.
 The machine direction:cross direction (MD:CD) ratio of
the fabric being formed can also be influenced by the
velocity of the water and the angle of the former. One of
the key advantages is the ability to process many diverse
types of fibre – every staple fibre that can disperse in water
can be formed on the system, including Kevlar, leather
and even stainless steel.
 Spunlaid nonwovens – spunbond, meltblown, apertured
films and the many layered combinations of these products
– are manufactured with machinery developed from
polymer extrusion, with the fibre structures simultaneously
formed from molten filaments and manipulated.
 In a basic spunbonding system, sheets of synthetic
filaments are extruded from polymer onto a conveyor as a
randomly oriented web in the closest approximation to a
continuous polymer-to-fabric operation.
 Most of the first proprietary spunbonding systems were
developed by synthetic fibre producers such as DuPont in
the USA and Rhone-Poulenc in France.
 DuPont is regarded as the first to successfully
commercialise spunbonding with its Typar product,
launched as a tufted, carpet-backing system in the
mid-1960s. The first commercial spunbonding system
to be offered was the Docan system developed by the
Lurgi engineering group in the 1960s and licensed to
Corovin (now part of Fiberweb) in Germany, Sodoca in
France (also Fiberweb), Chemie Linz in Austria,and
Crown Zellerbach and Kimberly-Clark in the USA.
 The next major step towards the global commercialisation
of the spunbond process was with the introduction of
Reifenhäuser’s Reicofil system in 1984.
 The development of this technology was not rapid – the
German company spent more than a decade in developing
it after patents from the original inventors lapsed.
 The first Reifenhäuser Reicofil spunbonding line was
installed in China in 1986 and by 2009 around 180 lines of
varying sizes and outputs had been sold.
 This gives Reicofil technology an estimated share of as
much as 87% of commercial machines serving the huge
hygiene market. Reicofil became an independent
subsidiary of Reifenhäuser solely dedicated to this
technology, in 2005.
In melt blown web forming process, polymer granules
which are low viscous in nature and molten polymer
granules are drawn by a high velocity air stream
through nozzle tip (extruder die).
 The drawing polymer is performed by drag force of air
stream and gets converted into microfibres.
 The fine fibres formed are then solidified on the
collector as web.
 The air temperature is fixed equal or slightly higher
than the melting point of the polymer.
Random fibre orientation, lower to moderate web strength, fine fibre diameter, high
surface area for good insulation and filtration are main characteristics of melt blow
web, Isotropic products are obtained through the melt blow process.
 The orientation of fibres in web can be in four
directions;
 Parallel laid
 Cross laid
 Crisscross laid
 Random laid
 In the parallel-laid webs, the fibres are laid in a
lengthwise orientation.
 This implies that this type of web has greater strength
in the lengthwise direction than the transverse
direction.
 According to the demand of mass and fibre type, the
parallel-laid web permits the repetition of fibrous
webs.
 The number of layers in the web decides the number
of cards required.
 Random Fibre orientation in the web is achieved by
incorporating randomizing rolls in the card.
 Random rolls are generally located between the main
cylinder & doffer.
 The configuration, diameter, & position of the
randomizing rolls are different for the different
manufacturer.