Technical textiles save lives: 6. triage tents
Technical textiles make the difference. You can find it in mouth masks, decontamination units, quarantine curtains, triage tents, mattress protectors, medical intervention clothing, temporary storage areas, aprons and countless other applications. Technical textiles protect and save lives, today more than ever.
What are technical textiles
Technical textiles are the third pillar of the textile industry, in addition to fashion textiles and interior textiles. It is a collection of textile products that offer a solution to a whole range of social and industrial challenges.
Today there are more challenges than ever. The corona COVID-19 virus occupies the whole world. With all our might, we fight this evil beast. Technical textiles play a crucial role in this. How, what and why is covered in this series. In this article we highlight triage tents.
Triage
Triage is a word that we hear very little in normal times and never even use in our daily talks with each other. Today, you can no longer watch or read a news report or journal without hearing or reading it.
Triage comes from the French language and literally means 'sort'. It is the assessment of victims of disasters and pandemics, after which you divide them into different categories according to the severity of the injuries or the clinical verdict. The categories each have their own follow-up and their own type of treatment, but often people also physically end up in other rooms.
In a pandemic like the current one where hospitals often cannot cope with the influx of the many patients in their buildings, triage tents are often pitched. After all, it would not be wise in these circumstances to expose healthy people, who, for example,come to hospital with a broken leg, to people suffering from the coronavirus.
Important properties of triage tents
It is now important that triage rooms and emergency tents can be pitched quickly and efficiently when they are needed. After all, they have to be operational very quickly. And when the tide turns, they must also be pulled down easily. As with any product, the raw material is the basis of everything. This is also the case for triage tents that are used to combat the corona COVID-19 virus. They must be made of materials that are wind- and waterproof, durable and washable. In addition, it must be possible to clean them with high pressure and with disinfectants.Often they also have to withstand industrial bulk cleaning.
Afterwards, they must be as solid as when they were first used, which means that they must not have any visible defects such as cracks and leaks, but they must also be free of invisible defects such as creases and cracks in which bacteria are formed. Because a triage tent has to be mobile and modular, it can be folded up, cleaned, moved, extended, dismantled, ... every day. A good quality of fabric [technical textiles] is therefore crucial.
How is it made
At our production sites in Mouscron (B), Kerksken (B), Ardooie (B), Saint-Clair-de-la-tour (F) and Flixecourt (F) we produce technical textiles for triage tents. The fabric consists of so many different components that together form one technical textile that can save lives.
The fabric for a triage tent consists of a fabric, a coating layer and a layer of varnish. Simply put, we put the paste on (which we produce in our own chemical factories) in four layers on a fabric (which we weave in our own weaving mills, withyarns that we produced ourselves). We finish it off with three layers of varnish for extra protection.
Can you still follow? It's all quite complicated, but maybe the videos on YouTube can help you a bit. You can watch how we spin our own yarns, we weave ourselves, we make our color pigments and varnishes ourselves and connect all these components in the coating process.
Our rolls of technical textiles are processed by customers all over the world, including triage tents.
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