TEXTILES.ORG
Gebr. Kufferath AG (GKD) of Duren, Germany, will present its newest developments in technical textiles and nonwovens at Techtextil, May 4–7, with a focus on the company’s latest material combinations: weaves and mesh finishes, including coatings, hybrid weaves and multi-dimensional mesh constructions.
Coatings
GKD’s coated mesh constructions optimize separation rates or improve abrasion resistance. Integrated into the complex systems for filtration, purification or separation, such coatings also contribute to longer life cycles and higher performance of filters. The instrument GKD uses to apply the coatings also controls and reduces pore size of existing standard meshes through precisely defined coating thicknesses, allowing filter media with very fine filtration rates to be made from robust mesh types.
Hybrid weaves
GKD’s hybrid weaves combine different material properties, such as strength and flexibility, in a single mesh construction to meet the requirements of specific applications. Combining such materials as basalt, glass or ceramics with metal wires or fibers and polymers, novel meshes with custom specifications can be created; such constructions enable processing procedures like special coatings to be shortened. Other combinations of a high-strength mechanical base construction and a fiber increase the specific surface area, and the company’s hybrid weaves that combine the electrical conductivity of metallic materials with textile materials offer shielding options against electromagnetic radiation (EMR).
Three-dimensional mesh constructions
Volumetric weaves offer a total thickness up to 70 percent higher than conventional meshes with the same wire diameter. The 3-dimensional mesh texture offer high-volume porosity and distinctive depth effects. With permeability increased by up to 50 percent, pressure drop is reduced by up to 60 percent and particle retention is substantially increased. This non-symmetrical pore size distribution of the mesh filters out different particle sizes, improving overall filtration efficiency. It also allows improved draping capacity for fitting around existing substructures.
Optimized plain Dutch weave
GKD’s optimized plain Dutch weaves (ODW) offer a high-performance mesh for polymer filtration. ODW is characterized by the mesh design of its stainless steel construction, which creates a slot-shaped pore geometry on the mesh surface—the openings are smaller than the pores inside the mesh, allowing filtration rates in the microfiltration range down to 10µm with higher throughput rates and good cleaning properties.