Fibre Extrusion Technology celebrates record year in 2022

Fibre Extrusion Technology Ltd. (FET, Leeds, U.K.) a laboratory and pilot melt spinning systems supplier, is celebrating a record-breaking year of sales and product innovation. “Sales revenue for 2022 has easily beaten our previous high,” FET managing director, Richard Slack, says, “and the research projects we have collaborated in have become increasingly challenging in terms of technical specification.”

Prestigious new projects during 2022 included a multifilament melt spinning line for Senbis Polymer Innovations (Emmen, Netherlands) enabling the development of textile fibers from recycled polymers or biopolymers; an FET-200LAB wet spinning system at the University of Manchester (U.K.) which FET says will play an important part in advanced materials research in collaboration with Henry Royce Institute; and an FET-103 Monofilament line for Rheon Labs (London, U.K.) to help develop a hyper-viscoelastic fiber from Rheon, which displays high strain-rate sensitive properties. The latter two projects were aided by U.K. grants to develop advanced materials.

FET is now looking forward to 2023 with a record order book. The company’s newly opened Fibre Development Centre features a more than £1.5 million investment in customer laboratory systems that will further enable fiber trials and product R&D. According to the company, three new polymer types were developed with clients in 2022 and several more are lined up in 2023, which is expected to bring the total of different polymer types to more than 40 in multifilament, monofilament and nonwoven formats.