Interview with Claudio Fracasso

A spunbond, a meltblown or even more a multibeam composite line, is a quite complex system which involves a considerable amount of work. Considering the whole process from design, construction, pre-erection c/o our premises, disassembling, shipment, erection and commissioning, it takes from 12 to 24 months depending on the plant complexity. Compared to the period before the COVID-19 pandemic, but in particular in the last few months, the biggest difficulty we face is planning a fixed selling price and a reliable delivery time due to price and availability uncertainty of raw materials like steel and others. From installation and commissioning point of view, again, COVID-19 entry restrictions are playing an important role causing extensions of planned timetable.

Mainly the increase of sustainability through the development of technologies which permit to reduce the level of utilities consumption and at the same time giving more flexibility to facilitate the broad-scale usage of recycled plastic materials.

Solid knowledge of synthetic fibre manufacturing process, spirit of innovation, technical background and, a particular ability of Italians to listen to the customer needs with capability to design tailor-made, customised solutions.

Yes, in particular for the hygienic, medical and filtration fields. But even the demand of staple fibre lines, which is the base raw material for most of the traditional nonwovens production technologies, increased.

This is not easy to answer as reliable numbers of nonwovens producers in many countries/areas are not available. As far as we are concerned, more than 500 worldwide installations have been implemented.

Via a variety of benefits starting from a consistent reduction of electric power consumption, then an optimised melt homogenisation with efficient decontamination and limited polymer degradation. All this bring to the largest process flexibility with not only the possibility to process PET flakes instead of virgin PET granules but also biobased materials which is a need more and more requested by the market.

These are used in most of current market applications. FARE’ technology principle is based on a concept which allows producing fine denier-based nonwovens typically for hygiene, medical, filtration, facemasks and other applications, as well as coarse denier-based nonwovens for applications like geotextiles and civil engineering, roofing and building, coating substrates, household, packaging and others. For both types, a proprietary bicomponent technology is available with various filaments sections to offer a variety of benefits.

Again, not easy to answer as the COVID-19 pandemic changed a lot the worldwide situation and relevant trends. Some matured markets like Europe showed a big demand in particular for filtration and hygiene nonwovens while emerging markets like Africa where availability of such type of products is limited did not show the interest that might have been expected. In addition, the difficulties in terms of price and delivery time for the steel and other raw materials with consequent extension of equipment delivery time and consistent increase of selling price, has changed the planning of many projects some of which are anticipated to not materialise for fear that the general conditions will worsen, while some others are postponed in anticipation of better times.

Of course, we have an after-sales organisation granting the availability of original replacement parts. We can propose also specific line revamping to obtain technological and innovative development or optimisation of lines efficiency to let clients challenge new markets and opportunities. Great attention is dedicated to the concept of Industry 4.0, which includes an open digital environment of Human Machine Interface and plans of predictive maintenance.

We showed our complete technology portfolio with particular highlight to equipment for spunbond high-loft fine denier nonwovens and coarse denier spunbond equipment with balanced MD/CD tensile strength.

Chinese market is quite complex as from one side demand of nonwovens is increasing, while on the other side several local equipment suppliers can offer an ‘entry-level’ equipment to produce standard spunbond, meltblown or composite nonwovens. This equipment however, even though it is considerably cheaper than the European made one, is much less reliable and efficient, so we concentrate our commercial efforts only towards customers who are looking for reliable technologies and where price is only one of the factors to consider and not the main one.

We expect an increase in the use of nonwovens in new applications and technology optimisation with the aim of reduction of utilities consumption, and higher flexibility to use recycled and biobased raw materials.