Do You Know What Functional Fabrics Are Available?

You should be unfamiliar with the best functional textiles, but you absolutely know the storm-suit, mountaineering suit, and quick drying garment. These clothes and our usual clothes have little difference in the appearance but with some “special” functions, such as waterproof and rapid air drying, which is the role of functional fabrics. The functional textile and cloth is a kind of cloth with special function and super performance by changing the fabric properties and adding various functional agents and processes in the production process and finishing.

Classification of Functional Fabrics

Functional fabrics can be generally divided into two categories:

• Sports functional fabrics mainly include mountaineering clothes, skiing clothes, and shock suits, which are suitable for harsh environment and can protect people. Sports functional fabrics need to test physical performance indexes such as shrinkage, seam slip, elongation strength, tear strength, pH value, water resistance, water pressure resistance, moisture permeability, rain, light, water, sweat, friction, machine wash, etc.
• Leisure functional fabric is mainly leisure fashion, which pays attention to fine workmanship, soft feel, and wear comfortably.

Examples of Functional Fabrics

Super Waterproof Fabric
Ordinary raincoat can be waterproof but the air permeability is poor, which is not conducive to perspiration. However, water vapor and sweat can pass through the porous structure membrane with pore size smaller than raindrop on the fabric surface by using the difference of water vapor particle and raindrop size.

Flame Retardant Fabric
Ordinary fabrics will burn when exposed to fire, while flame retardant fabrics will polymerize, blend, copolymerize, and composite spin the flame retardant with polymer, so that the fiber has permanent flame-retardant properties.

Flame retardant fabrics mainly include aramid fiber, flame retardant acrylic fiber, flame retardant viscose, flame retardant polyester, smoldering vinylon, etc., which are suitable for making protective clothing for metallurgy, oil field, coal mine, chemical industry, electric power, and fire protection industry.

Color Changing Fabric
The color changing fabric is made by encapsulating the color changing functional fiber into microcapsules and dispersing it into the resin solution, which can change color with the changes of light, heat, liquid, pressure, electronic wire, etc. Generally speaking, the traffic clothes and swimsuits made of color changing fabrics can play a role in safety protection as well as the effect of colorful spots.

Radiation Proof Fabric

• Metal fiber anti-radiation fabric is a kind of fabric which is made by drawing stainless steel metal into fine silk and blended with fabric fiber, whose main characteristics are good air permeability, wash-ability, and light radiation resistance. In general, metal functional textile fiber can play a good protective role, which is the raw material of radiation proof clothing.
• Metallized fabric is to use electrolysis method to make metal penetrate into the fabric and form metal conductor, so as to achieve electromagnetic shielding effect. Although the metallized fabric with strong protective ability is suitable for telecommunication transmitter room, the characteristics of thick fabric and poor air permeability make the metallized fabric only suitable for high-power radiation places such as high-power transmitting station.

Far Infrared Functional Fiber Fabric
The far-infrared functional fiber fabric has excellent health care physiotherapy, moisture removal, air permeability, and antibacterial functions. The far infrared fabric can absorb the heat emitted from the human body, emit the far-infrared ray that most needed by the human body, promote blood circulation, and have the functions of keeping warm, antibacterial and physiotherapy.