Niche markets for protective clothing

You may have wondered about “niche markets,” and why they are important. A niche market essentially specializes in a smaller area of a broader market. That niche allows you to create a more focused business so you can establish a loyal customer base because you are concentrating on your customers’ specific needs. This helps to establish a long relationship resulting in repeat business. 

Our broader market area in this article is protective clothing, which is a growing market. According to an October 2025 report from Grandview Research, the global protective clothing market is expected to increase from $14.01 billion in 2025 to $19.44 billion in 2030. 

Most people think of masks and face shields when they hear the phrase “protective clothing” or “personal protective equipment” (PPE) because of Covid 19 and its variants. But that’s just one market niche. The protective clothing market can be segmented by application, or what you are protecting a person from. This could be chemicals, viruses, flame or fire, sharp edges, falls, and other hazards, which represent the specialized markets within the protective clothing market.

Chemical protection

In chemical protection it’s safety first, but that can mean issues with other attributes. The best way to mitigate chemical exposure hazards is to wear chemical resistant clothing that does not allow chemicals to penetrate through the fabric of the ensemble to reach the skin. 

But an impermeable chemical protective suit that is impervious to chemicals, liquids, vapor, aerosols, and air creates a substantial thermal burden on the wearer, so it can be quite uncomfortable, unbreathable, heavy, bulky, and too hot. Therefore, a lot of research is being conducted to make ensembles with a lower thermal burden, more breathable and lightweight, in particular. It’s also important that moisture vapor from the body passes through the garment for some amount of comfort. The U.S. military has been developing chemical protective garments to protect the warfighter since World War I, and they’ve come a long way since then.

The Joint Service Lightweight Integrated Suit Technology (JSLIST), is one system worn today by the U.S. military, which provides chemical and biological protection. JSLIST is a two-piece overgarment consisting of a coat and trousers. The layered material cross-section consists of an outer layer of nylon-cotton ripstop fabric, and an inner layer of nonwoven fabric laminated to a layer of activated carbon spheres that are bonded to an innermost tricot knit fabric.

The Dept. of Defense (DoD) has also developed another standard overgarment termed the uniform integrated protection ensemble (UIPE) that has an improved thermal burden, compared to JSLIST, but it is also heavy and bulky.

Oil and water repelllency

Coatings for water and oil repellency are used world-wide and in everyday life. They are achieved with a combination of particular geometries or surface structures and low energy materials leading to wettability features. Examples of uses for these coatings are corrosion protection, self-cleaning, anti-icing, rainwear, as well as chemical protective garments. 

Surface wettability or lack of wetting is an important feature of the coated material. You do not want liquids to stick to the coated surface. Surface wetting depends on various influences like surface energy and roughness. One way to evaluate wettability is looking at the contact angle. In the case of water, Figure 1 demonstrates a hydrophilic surface with a contact angle between 0° and 90°; a hydrophobic surface with a contact angle between 90° and 180°; while a superhydrophobic surface has a contact angle greater than 180°. If you change the liquid to oil, it would be oleophilic, oleophobic and superoleophobic based upon the contact angles in Figure 1.

Meeting the challenges

For chemical protective garments, it would be best to have a coating with both superhydrophobic and super oleophobic properties. Previously, the most highly used repellent finish contained per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). However, PFAS poses a serious problem because of their persistence in the environment and the impacts on human and environmental health. Because of these issues, local, state and the federal government are regulating PFAS use, and there is a tremendous amount of research underway to eliminate PFAS use entirely.

The fabric coating on chemical protective garments repels liquids, but chemical vapors may be able to permeate through the fabric. The activated carbon spheres in the JSLIST liner absorb those chemical vapor agents. However, activated carbon faces challenges and is limited because of “nonselective adsorption,” because it also adsorbs water and moisture from perspiration. Fabrics from activated carbon are also heavy.

One solution is to engineer a fabric-based functionalized composite for protection against chemical agents that absorb then react, neutralize, detoxify and, therefore, be self-decontaminating. The dual functionally simultaneously blocks chemical agent penetration while neutralizing absorbed contaminants. Some inorganic metal nanostructured materials can catalytically degrade chemical agents into non-toxic or less toxic materials. Some nano metal oxide particles (MgO, TiO2, ZnO, ZrO2, and MgAl2O4), and metal hydroxides [Ti(OH)x, Zr(OH)4] exhibit phenomenal adsorption and catalytic degradation by hydrolysis because of their nanoscale size with high surface area, allowing adsorption and chemical properties.

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a type of porous material that have nanoscale metal-oxo clusters used for chemical protection because they have very large surface area and their pores are tailorable. Some MOF options are zirconium based, (UiO-66, UiO-66-NH2, MOF-808) and perform decontamination, and catalytic Zr6O4(OH)4 clusters give Zr-MOFs as the next-generation self-detoxifying materials for chemical protection. They are neutralized by hydrolysis. 

These MOFs can be incorporated into composite fabrics as thin films/layers possibly by electrospinning/electrospraying or dip coating. Because of the nanoscale size, these materials are not as heavy as the activated carbon of the JSLIST.

One company has created garment prototypes using an MOF-based chemical and biological PPE solution. Numat Technologies Inc. developed SENTINEL®, an advanced decontamination and chemical filtration technology. This material captures and destroys chemical agents on contact and is PFAS-free. Figure 2 shows a DoD concept of a four-layer composite fabric based upon MOFs.

Another technique would be to create a functionalized selectively permeable membrane that can neutralize or self-detoxify chemical agents while allowing gases to pass away from the body through the fabric to the outside creating a more breathable composite chemical protective fabric. This can be done by electrospinning/electrospraying directly on the surface of a fabric which also reduces manufacturing steps. The typical electrospinning/electrospraying needs to be modified for roll-to-roll capability to produce a composite fabric.

An MOF-based textile composite for chemical protection is not necessarily the final answer. There are still many more materials being developed and evaluated for chemical protection. More work is needed to optimize those materials, their manufacturing processes, and performance before they can be fully commercialized in the niche chemical protective market—especially for the military. 

Cheryl Gomes is Technical Programs Manager –FDC & Government Programs, Industry Partners & Economic Development at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

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