Come rain, come wind…and more!
How to be kinder to Mother Nature while dealing with her vagaries and vicissitudes like rough weather? How do you make tents and architecture fabrics more durable, sustainable and versatile at the same time?
The answer includes a combination of technology, teamwork and imagination. That’s what Ferrari did when conceiving their new PVC/polyester fabrics for high-tech keders, using recycled materials.
Although both sides of Ferrari’s creation are coated, one of them contains very precise non-coated stripes. This “non-coated” slippery side of the keder runs inside aluminum tubing, mainly used for the tent industry. The invention can also work with an inflatable system called ATS, making possible hard tension on the membranes.
Keders are essential accessories for a mechanical link between high-tech textiles and metal profiles, explains Mr. Carlos Saiz, Innovation and R&D Director of Ferrari S.A.
‘’These pieces are key elements for those high-tech fabrics that go into tents, awnings and membranes. We’re talking about a market of several million linear meters worldwide,’’ he says.
Saiz explains that keders are composed of two pieces, being the first one an extruded PVC tube with diameter ranging from 8 to 13 mm. That’s the easy part. Trickier is the second element: the one that slips inside the metal profiles during assembling.
“These unprotected polyester tissues are exposed to different weather conditions and suffer from premature degradation caused by UV light, dirt and moisture” explains Saiz. “In order to differentiate from our competitors, we had to propose a solution to overcome this rapid ageing of the materials.’’
And that’s when the “click” came. But it wasn’t easy, because Ferrari had to develop a coating system for the outside part of the polyester without losing the good slippery properties. The company’s know-how made the difference by assuring a pinpoint coating precision (half a millimeter) while producing industrial quantities.
To do that Ferrari had to put together a multidisciplinary team of experts in areas such as the mastery of internal coating lines, especially designed and manufactured in-house.
“This development was a great teamwork challenge for the Ferrari group, because we had to rely on design and formulation teams, process and application engineers, packaging and logistics experts. We were also able to meet the entire value chain: specialised keder manufacturers around the world, industrial end-users and textile construction designers. We have strengthened our bonds with the value chain to which we belong. Complex, but inspiring and stimulating”, says Saiz.
And since one nice solution is halfway for an even better one, Ferrari took advantage of the Texyloop® recycling process to create an inside tube made out of recycled PVC which helps improving the carbon footprint of this product, making it even more sustainable.
“These new keders turn the page of their ancestors and now it’s up to us to adjust our production capacity to supply these textiles to the market,’’ says Saiz. ‘’For sure a delightful challenge for the years to come.’’
On this photo, 2 roofs were installed at the same time, 2 years ago. The boltrope of the left roof is a standard of the market while that of the right is our new boltrope 719.
We see well the beginning of ageing of the left boltrope which begins to become green even grey by place then our new boltrope not
