A pilot plant equipment for continuous coating of technical textiles is implemented to establish thermal spraying as a new and promising coating technique in the textile industry. In order to apply thermal spraying to temperature sensitive and flexible fiber structures two main difficulties have to be taken into account. First, the flexible structure of a textile fabric has to be fixed and stretched to achieve a sufficient mechanical support. Second, the kinetic and thermal energy of the molten particles and the hot gas jet may damage the fibers and their woven structure both mechanically and chemically. Special winding equipment is designed to allow various fabrics to be fixed and stretched in a way that enables the coating of wound fabrics from “coil to coil”. With this equipment even temperature sensitive fabrics, like cotton or polyester, but also aramide, carbon and oxide ceramic fabrics are coated by atmospheric plasma spraying or electric arc wire spraying in the case that higher deposition rates are required. Fabric coils up to a web width of 1500 mm can be coated continuously with a well-defined pre-stress in one single procedure.

In this paper, aramid and mullite light fiber fabrics are coated with different ceramics by atmospheric plasma spraying. To check the suitability of the process for as many technical applications as possible, different ceramic materials are used and multilayer coatings are produced as well. Test results for bioinert and biocatalytic materials, such as titanium dioxide and aluminum oxide, and bioactive hydroxyapatite show that the concept has good potential for a range of biomedical applications. Paper includes a German-language abstract.