TEXTILES.ORG
A new trade show—SALTEX, Smart Textiles and Lightweight Materials—will take place at Dronbirn, Austria’s, Messe Dornbirn event center Oct. 5-6, 2016.
The focus of the show for smart textiles and fiber-reinforced composites, as well as their industrial automation, is on interdisciplinary knowledge transfer and networking, and is geared to exhibitors and visitors from neighboring countries, as well as experts from all over Europe.
Intelligent textiles and fiber-reinforced composites for lightweight structures are expected to see considerable growth and increasing market significance. According to NanoMarkets, the market size of smart clothing will increase until 2021 to $1.8 billion. Lightweight structures are most likely to achieve a global market size of around $157.4 billion (140 billion euros) in 2020 with an average growth rate of 7 to 8 percent, according to recent studies.
Hosting 180 embroidery factories, Vorarlberg—part of the Bodensee region including neighboring Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Principality of Liechtenstein—is considered the “textile Silicon Valley”; it is the fourth most important area for embroidery in the world. Technical embroidery is facing exciting new applications: Sensors are applied to surfaces by embroidering, conductivity is produced or textile batteries developed.
The Institute of Textile Chemistry and Textile Physics in Dornbirn, a satellite of the University of Innsbruck, is also involved.