Innovative 2D and 3D fabric-forming methods have been developed in the last 20 years to practically overcome the inherent technical and economic limitations of traditional textile processes that are employed for manufacturing reinforcements, or pre-forms, for composites application. These developments include Tape-Weaving, Oblique Fabric-forming Technique, 3D-Weaving and Uniaxial Noobing. The working principles of these processes and the correspondingly producible 2D and 3D fabric architectures are fundamentally different from the existing ones. They open up new academic and industrial opportunities. This Paper presents these specifically developed processes and their products.

The potential of a non-woven 3D fabric-forming process, called uniaxial noobing, remains unexploited because it is mistaken for the 3D-weaving process as it imitates the weaving process in some ways. Its principle is technically different from that of weaving because the involved sets of yarns are not interlaced. The composite materials industry is beginning to be attracted to the 3D fabrics produced by the uniaxial noobing process because it fulfils three important conditions to advantageously enlarge the market. The foremost being it incorporates linear or crimp-less fibres/yarns oriented in the length, width and thickness directions of the 3D fabric to improve composite materials’ delamination resistance and mechanical performance. Next, it makes available individual 3D fabrics in required customised dimensions and object-like shapes for ease of handling and direct use, besides lowering production time and costs. Finally, such customised 3D fabrics are able to be developed quickly for prototyping and then manufactured in relatively very-small batch production cycles. This paper presents the necessary technical and practical aspects of this unique process to make it industrially relevant.

The barriers for entering the medical textiles market are rather strong as it is highly technically specialised and dominated by long established players. An approach for entering this market could be to consider the newly evolving 3D-weaving and uniaxial noobing processes as they produce entirely new 3D fabric structures compared with traditional 2D structures. They thus present completely fresh research and business opportunities for developing and marketing innovative 3D fabric based healthcare products.