Germany has a strong network of textile research centers. The high-performance institutes are located in the former historical centers of the textile industry in Baden-Wuerttemberg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony and Thuringia. Thanks to them, the textile industry has turned from a traditional sector for clothing, home textiles and fashion into the world’s largest producer and exporter of technical textiles.
Beneficiaries are aviation, automotive and logistics as well as the construction and machine building sectors or the health care and energy industry. Smart Textiles or fibers with new surface properties are used more and more for clothing and home textiles.
Textile research gives priority to material research. It focusses mainly on new materials, fibers’ and fabric’s properties, composites, surface functionalization, production and processing technologies, material safety, value chain, resource efficiency and sustainability.
For more than 60 years now, FKT coordinates a network of actually 16 textile research institutes in Germany. About 1.200 researchers participate in national and EU funding schemes to develop new technologies and innovations in the field of fiber-based materials and textile composites giving input into many industrial growth sectors.
This unique textile research network links education, research and economy. Collective research projects initiated by SME are funded on a pre-competitive level in the scheme of Industrielle Gemeinschaftsforschung (IGF) by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.
Due to these research activities textile industry converted to a material supplier constantly renewing products, processes and services. FKT accelerates knowledge transfer of research results into SME by linking industry and science.
