Standards are not written in stone

May 11, 2015  |  My Take

Nobody’s going to argue the importance of having standards for fire resistant and fire retardant textiles, but the issue of standards is anything but simple. Who decides? Who does the testing? Which fabrics for which uses must meet which standards? In fact the new California State Fire Marshall st…
Read More
Using what we have, better

April 10, 2015  |  My Take

We talk quite a bit on this website about the development of new fibers to build new textiles for specific performance requirements. Sometimes, however, a whole new textile is not required. Techniques for modifying the surfaces of textiles have become so sophisticated that many materials can be effe…
Read More
Power from the people

March 6, 2015  |  My Take

In 1979, I bought a house (yes, I was very young), the direct result of an initiative by President Jimmy Carter to promote solar energy use. Designed for passive and active solar gain, our system partially heated a house for an eventual family of five and generated more hot water than we could use. …
Read More
When is a fabric a fabric?

February 10, 2015  |  My Take

This month, our featured material is not about a specific market area, per se, but rather about the challenge of commercializing new technology in any segment of the industry. There’s enough to talk about here to fill a shelf of encyclopedias (remember those?), so the challenge was to manage the t…
Read More
The sum of its parts

January 12, 2015  |  My Take

There are layers and layers (so to speak) to the flexible composites story. We’re going to start with architectural applications in this issue and move on to additional applications throughout this month. Bruce Wright offers up-to-date information on this topic in his article, “Flexible composit…
Read More
Green is growing

December 8, 2014  |  My Take

Each month Advanced Textiles Source features a topic of interest in the industry. It’s a useful way for us organize our publication and ensure that we continue to provide you with interesting unique content in our “Featured” section. This month the topic is sustainability. We always cover news…
Read More
This is a different kind of fight

November 24, 2014  |  My Take

The military is used to deploying to dangerous locations around the globe, but these are generally combat missions with a foe whose ideology threatens our security. There is another foe with which U.S. troops will do battle; its name is “Ebola.” What’s needed in this fight against a clearly da…
Read More
Disrupt or be disrupted

November 11, 2014  |  My Take

At IFAI’s Advanced Textiles Expo in October, Dr. Benham Pourdeyhimi from NCSU’s Nonwovens Institute concluded his presentation with this admonition: “Disrupt or be disrupted.” (See “Keynotes offer overviews” on this site.) Nonwovens markets are growing, but they are also undergoing signi…
Read More
Medical textiles save lives

October 10, 2014  |  My Take

Medical professionals are limited in what they can do to save someone who is very sick with an Ebola virus; there is no magic cure or a vaccine to prevent it. But there is a way to prevent the spread of the frequently deadly viruses and potentially save thousands of lives. It involves fabric. This &…
Read More
Horizontal and vertical programming

September 8, 2014  |  My Take

There’s a lot going on in this year’s Advanced Textiles Conference, running Oct. 13–14. A good cross-section of markets is well represented in the conferences symposiums, as well as in-depth sessions on specific materials and technologies. The conference, which opens one day prior to IFAI Spec…
Read More