Spacer fabrics are textile surface constructions with an enormous range of applications. They are equally popular in medical technology as in the construction industry. Textile spacer technologies can be used to produce form-flexible composite systems.
New DITF process approaches have made the breakthrough from conventional plane-parallel spacer fabrics to double-curved fabric structures. In architecture, for example, this enables curved shell elements made of lightweight fiber composite materials for walls or roof constructions, whose textile basic structure simultaneously serves as load-bearing reinforcement and formwork. The technological innovation: It is now possible to produce one-piece multilayer fabrics with different spacings on one weaving machine for lightweight sandwich or hollow structures
The use of textile spacer technologies is still very rare in the solar industry today but it could be common place soon: the DITF and their partners are developing a flexible textile heat collector with integrated latent heat storage. The black absorber layer converts incident solar radiation into heat and the heat is transported by air in a flow-through spacer fabric to the storage medium at the end of the collector.