Freudenberg customizing FR materials
By David Perry -- Furniture Today, January 25, 2004
DURHAM, N.C — DURHAM, N.C. — Freudenberg Nonwovens is adding an element of flexibility to its Viledon fire-resistant mattress materials by offering application-specific product designs.
This approach, which the company refers to as an Integrated Systems Solution, is designed to optimize material performance by matching the performance of the FR materials as closely as possible to the physical characteristics of the mattress itself.
Jim Frasch, vice president of Freudenberg's Technical Nonwovens unit in North America, said that because no two mattress designs are the same, it makes sense to customize the FR material to the mattress configuration in order to assure that it has the best chance of achieving the desired performance – and that it won't alter the aesthetic appearance of the mattress.
Lots of options
Freudenberg is in the process of testing the new product options it will make available and expects to have samples ready by the end of January. At that point it will be ready to take orders through HS Converting of Conover, which is handling the sales and distribution of the Freudenberg FR mattress materials in North America.
"What we are doing here," said Ashutosh Karnik, Freudenberg's market manager for mattress fire barriers, "is to give the customer a lot of options to choose from."
He noted that bedding producers must offer FR protection on both vertical and horizontal surfaces of the mattress and must incorporate that protection in the wide variety of beds they produce. Thus, there is no one design that will satisfy all the possible options, he said.
Broad scope
As one of the world's largest nonwovens manufacturers, Freudenberg has a history of developing products for a wide range of applications.
"Nonwovens are engineered fabrics which can be developed with a predetermined composition and a set of performance characteristics that can meet the precise physical and functional requirements of a given application," Karnik said. "In the case of a mattress installation, this quality has a direct effect on the integrity of the barrier as an inhibitor of fire damage as well as the manufacturability of the product itself."
Freudenberg officials said that while all of their products will meet the pending California flammability requirements, their company is in a position to improve upon those standards with products that will help extinguish a fire more quickly, should a customer so choose.
Future needs
"We believe that in the future there will be a need to have performance levels that are higher than the present standards, based upon competitive issues or consumer preference, and we want the industry to know when that time comes, we will be able to supply higher performance materials at prices that are appropriate to the need," said Charlie Mason, Freudenberg's general manager of mattress fire barriers.
Freudenberg Nonwovens LP, which maintains its North American headquarters in Durham, is part of Carl Freudenberg of Weinheim, Germany, a global leader in the field of technical textiles, with operations in 34 countries.
Freudenberg announced its entry into the FR mattress materials market in October 2002. But FR is not a new field for the company.. Its apparel interlining division has been manufacturing a material to protect the outer clothing of firefighters since 1997.
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Freudenberg customizing FR materials
Jan 27, 2004
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