Textile production

4.6.1. Protective textiles
Millions of people worldwide have working environments which expose them to specific risks from which their bodies need protection. In many industrial sectors, military and energy services, hospital environments, etc., human beings are subjected to various types of risks and each sector has its own requirements for protective clothing. The performance requirement of all types of protective clothing often demands the balance of widely different properties of drape, thermal resistance, liquid barrier, water vapour permeability, antistatic, stretch, etc. The seemingly contradictory requirement of creating a barrier – for example, towards heat, cold, chemicals, bacteria – and breathability in high-functional clothing has placed challenging demands on new technologies for producing fibres, fabrics and clothing design.
4.6.2. Smart interactive textiles
Another area of great importance is smart interactive textiles and wearable systems. Promising results and prototypes have been developed by research teams in the USA and Europe, especially in the field of military clothing and health monitoring. However, there are still some main barriers towards wide markets, such as (1) a slow market exploitation process because the textile and clothing industries are not being sufficiently engaged and (2) several issues of technical, user-oriented, social and commercial character still need to be solved. The European Commission has funded a number of projects in this area and a cluster of smart textiles EC-funded projects has been established.¹⁸ Further integration of micro-nanotechnologies and flexible systems in textile material aim to implement the ‘e-textile’ paradigm, where sensing, actuating, communicating, processing and power sourcing are seamlessly integrated on a textile: a key future R&D area with a large amount of potential applications and business opportunities. Whereas remarkable achievements in terms of feasibility and prototypes in the application areas of sport, medical, transport, building, health and interactive clothing have been made, there is still a lack of a ‘killer application’; the implemented technologies have not yet proven to be beneficial for industry and there is a lack of industrial supply chain products. Manufacturing technologies for efficient production on an industrial scale are lacking, as are the quality, performance and safety standards.