The potential market size for different textile items has been projected upto 2007-08. However, considering the scope of technical textiles and its nascent stage of production in the country, the growth will continue even after 2007-08 and may be at higher rate due to global market opportunities available.

Basic consideration for production of technical textiles

The basic fundamental considerations involved in the production of technical textiles are:

• To understand the needs of the end-consumer and translate their requirements into textile parameters.
• To select suitable polymeric material such as natural (cotton, jute, flex, wool, etc), regenerated fibres (rayons and acetate), synthetic fibres (polyester, polyamide, polyolefins, polyacrylonitrile, carbon etc), mineral fibres (asbestos, glass etc) and metals.
• To select appropriate form of the polymeric material such as monofilament, tape, multifilament, spun, etc
• To adopt the most suitable converting process and the form of textile substrate such as woven, nonwoven, knitted, knotted, braided, tufted etc.
• To impart desired finishing to the textiles substrate and subject it to coating or lamination or other specialised processes if required, with chemicals such as PVC, polyurethane, acrylics, PVDF and other resins.

To convert the textiles into final products through right fabrication techniques.

Modular concept in extrusion process

Majority of technical textiles consume materials like cotton, silk, wool, jute, flex, regenerated fibres like viscose and acetate, synthetic fibres like polyester, polyamide, polyacrylonitrile, HDPE, polypropylene, etc. At the same time, certain speciality technical textiles consume higher performance fibres like aramids, carbon fibres, bicomponent fibres, PBI fibres etc. For certain applications, yarn properties such as denier per filament, elongation at break, modulus, residual shrinkage etc are altered with process variables. Today, there is a need to produce wide range of different yarns in small batches. To meet this requirement machinery builders have developed modular concept that facilitates relatively swift changing from one type of yarn to another one. Each module incorporates its own extrusion, dosing and winding system. Polymer feed, rate of colour addition, spin-finish, take-up and winding setting can be specified on individual modules for simultaneous production of different POY and FDY filament yarns in a line consisting of several modules.

Nanofibre

Nano technology is defined as the use of physical or chemical techniques to construct materials, devices or systems on a nanometer scale. It is the technology that can significantly improve properties of materials. Today, this technology is applied to such as sensors and actuators, composites, coatings and structures, medical textiles. It has immense potentiality; in particular, the applications of nanotechnology in the field of technical textiles are limited by the imagination and creativity of those working in the sector. Nanostructures fibres are those with at least one dimension in the range of 1-100 nanometres, containing nano-scale particles or with nano-sized clusters on their surface. They are commonly produced using electrospinning process. Electro-spinning uses electrostatic forces to draw the pendant droplets of a polyester solution into fibres to be deposited on a substrate. The advantages of electrospinning arise from its ability to produce novel synthetic fibres of only nano-scale diameter. It produces fibre masses with high surface area to volume ratio and small pore sizes.