Most of us might never know about spunlace nonwoven fabric, but indeed we use many products which are made from spunlace nonwoven fabric, such as wet wipes, facial mask, alcohol swab, sanitary napkins.
DEFINITION
Spunlace (hydroentanglement) is a bonding process for wet or dry fibrous webs made by either carding, airlaying or wet-laying, the resulting bonded fabric being a nonwoven.
It uses fine, high pressure jets of water which penetrate the web, hit the conveyor belt (or “wire” as in papermaking conveyor) and bounce back causing the fibres to entangle.
INGREDIENT
Polyester Fiber
Spunlace non woven fabric used short staple fibers, the most popular is viscose(38mm*1.67dtex) and polyester staple fibers(38mm*1.56dtex).
Sometimes Polypropylene (PP) also used in spunlace production.
Some other raw material, such as cotton, tencel,chitin etc. These fibers are more natural and they are from plant or animal, which is more expensive.
That is all about spunlace meaning you want to know.
Spunlace Technology
Spunlace Machine
A spunlace productive line is several machine parts contains, like mixer machine, carding machine, water jets etc.. To invest a spunlace machine is big.
The local China spunlace nonwoven machinery are mainly from Feilong, Zhengfangji etc.
The famous one may be “ANDRITZ” in Europe.
Based on technical reason, imported machine is better than Chinese machine, both output and fabric quality.
Nowadays the most spunlace non woven fabric manufacturers are from US, Europe,China and Turkey, Vietiam, India and Indonesia also have the spunlace machines in currently years. But China should be the most complete types and export the most quantity every year.
The Characteristic of Spunlace Nonwoven
Flexible entanglement, does not affect the original characteristics of the fiber, does not damage the fiber.
Appearance is closer to traditional textiles than other nonwovens.
High strength, low fluffy.
High moisture absorption, rapid moisture absorption.
Good ventilation.
Soft, good shape
Various of Patterns
No adhesive reinforcement, washable
Also to produce the spunlace fabric, it is a big investment as mentioned before, the lines is very long and covers an large area.
Spunlace Process
Spunlace nonwoven Fabric is an important type of non woven fabric.(see what is non woven). The Spunlace process is a nonwovens manufacturing system that employs jets of water to entangle fibers and thereby provide fabric integrity. In last article, we have a photo to show the spunlace process:
In fact, with the development of spunlace nonwoven technology currently, we have some new spunlaced technology, one of the most important is woodpulp spunlace fabric:
- Woodpulp polyester non woven fabric
- Woodpulp pp non woven fabric
- Woodpulp viscose non woven fabric
- Woodpulp PLA non woven fabric
- Woodpulp Tencel non woven fabric
Based on the different lapping machine, spunlace have 2 types:
- Parallel lapped Spunlace Fabric
- Cross Lapped Spunlace Fabric.
What is the difference of Parallel lapped Spunlace Fabric & Cross Lapped Spunlace Fabric?
The main difference is their fabric strength. Take 40gsm 100% polyester spunlace fabric for example, we see their data sheet as below:
The first table is cross lapping spunlace, which MD & CD is both higher than parallel lapping spunlace fabric.
The parallel lapped spunlace can easy tear straight with its vertical direction, and cross lapped spunlace is not so easy to tear, you can not tear it in a straight line. On this occasion, parallel lapped spunlace is mostly used for wet wipes, and cross lapped spunlace are more widely used as dry wiping cloths or leather etc.
Application of Spunlace Non woven
First of all, spunlace non woven fabric is mainly used for wipes: such as home, personal, beauty, industrial, medical wipes, etc.
Too many Wipes both dry and wet are made by spunlace fabric.
Second, medical using is another major market for spun lace fabric: such as disposable surgical clothing, surgical cover cloth, surgical tablecloths, surgical aprons, etc;
And also wound application materials: bandages, gauze, Band-Aid, etc.
Third, spunlace fabric can make for clothes, for example clothing lining, baby clothes, training clothes, carnival night disposable color service, all kinds of protective clothing etc.
At least, it also decorative fabrics such as car interiors, home interiors, stage decoration, etc.
How to check spunlace fabric quality?
Some customers told us that they received a wrong or lower quality spunlace non woven fabric. Then how do you check you received the right quality spunlace fabric? It is easy to test by the lab or costs money to by a 3rd party to do that. But here we show you the way to test in very easy way which you do by yourself.
The most important for spunlace fabric is its composition, as viscose fibers is usually more expensive than polyester fiber, viscose made the spunlace better absorbent and higher quality for wiping.
The most easy way to test the blend of viscose & polyester is burned the fabric:
See the fabric after burned:
You can see the obvious difference during the burning.
More polyester the fabric will burn more quick and it is not easy to exterminate.After burning, there is a black induration. But 100% viscose after burning it is only gray, no induration. So burn faster and more induration, then the fabric contains more polyester.
We are the professional spunlace non woven manufacturer, we produce various of different spunlace fabric for customer requirement. Please contact us for your spunlace offers.
