Pre-needling

The web is loose, voluminous and with no rigidity. The fibers are primarily arranged horizontally. Most of the reorientation of fibers takes place in pre-needling. This often places relatively high stress on the needles and poses the risk of needle breakage and bending.

Intermediate needling

This is the actual "work" of the needling process. What matters here is to target specific product properties, such as tensile strength, expansion, fiber entanglement and dimensional stability. Several machines are often daisychained, and primarily alternate working from the top from the bottom.

Finish needling

Finish needling is fine-tuning. Important criteria to be targeted here are surface quality, abrasion-resistance, density and delamination. The finish-needling process uses needles that are very gentle on the fiber. For most areas of application important machine parameters, such as penetration depth and feed motion/stroke, are significantly reduced in order to achieve the desired finish quality.

This method for the mechanical bonding of nonwovens is also known as the spunlace method.

Hydroentanglement channels water at pressures of 30 to over 400 bar through very precisely manufactured nozzles. The individual water jets emerge at speeds up to 280m/s and form a continuous curtain of water. The impelling force of these water jets leads to mechanical anchoring of fibers in the product. The jet strip is contained in an injector (nozzle bar), which distributes the water evenly across the width of the hydroentanglement facility.