Heathcoat Fabrics over the moon with top award
TIVERTON-BASED textile manufacturer Heathcoat Fabrics has been recognised with a prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise for Innovation.
The company developed a high performance parachute fabric that has contributed to outstanding commercial success, including delivery of NASA’s Perseverance Rover on to the surface of Mars in February 2021. Heathcoat Fabrics is among a list of 51 companies who have received an innovation award, announced on April 21.
The innovation has opened the door to other niche space exploration projects, including returning cargo and astronauts from the International Space Station and ensuring the safe splashdown of a capsule containing the first all-civilian team to orbit the Earth.
Heathcoat Fabrics’ managing director, Cameron Harvie, said the Heathcoat ‘DecelAir Superlight’ fabric was designed to meet the strictest criteria for space exploration. Innovation underpins the technical textiles that Heathcoat develops, with new opportunities emerging in niche markets where needs are not met by existing methods and products. He said: “We make hundreds of different fabrics for many markets, from apparel to automotive components. We have been a pioneer in manufacturing parachute fabrics since the 1930s. When we met NASA at a symposium in 2015, they saw the potential of a new fabric we had developed and we began trials a year later.
“NASA’s standards have been challenging, to say the least. The fabric needed to be twice the strength of standard fabric, within a tight airpermeability window and able to withstand extended heat treatment. The fabric underwent a series of wind tunnel, land-based mortar and sounding rocket tests after which the fabric was selected and used for the successful Mars mission. The fabric even needed to be baked before any rocket was launched, to avoid sending bacteria or micro-organisms to another planet.
“By the nature of the yarn, it is difficult to weave and finish, and it needs to be perfect. There is no second chance opportunity on landing a multi-million dollar space probe. From our investment in high quality looms to the chemistry developed to give the fabric its specific properties, this has been a huge task over a number of years.”
Mr Harvie added: “The Heathcoat brand has historically been recognised for highest quality in textiles. This includes providing the veiling fabric for Queen Elizabeth’s royal wedding in 1947, and it’s fitting in her Jubilee year that she has personally approved our Queen’s Award for Innovation.”
Peter Hill, director of woven fabrics at Heathcoat, and Richard Crane, technical director, have steered a team that centred around three development engineers – Eleanor Newsome, Lotte De Leeuw and Nicola Willey. Ms Newsome was instrumental in creating the original concept fabrics for NASA and developing the final product used for Mars2020. She is now leading a development team for automotive and industrial belting fabrics with a focus on achieving energy-saving in drive systems. Lotte De Leeuw is a development engineer in woven fabrics, and is continuing the work in parachute development – working with all of Heathcoat’s space customer development teams for current and planned missions.
Ms de Leeuw said: “I have a masters in textiles, and rather than moving into fashion like many do I was interested to see textiles in areas you wouldn’t expect. At Heathcoat Fabrics we ask ‘what can we do’ with fabric, and our work is heavily calculations based, analysing how fabrics could work in new applications. We’re experimenting with different yarns and weaving patterns, and often this means challenging customers on what they expect from textiles. Can we get them to move their viewpoint from what they know to what could be possible to achieve their objectives?
“As textile engineers we’re unique because we work across technical fabrics in so many areas. We know for example that some of our textiles under the bonnet in automotive applications operate for hours and hours at extremely high temperatures, so we can learn from this to ensure we achieve no loss of strength at high temperatures in other applications such as space.
“I’m now working new developments in parachute fabric for space that are in testing, making chute fabric that is up to twice as strong as the Mars chute fabric without significantly increasing weight and still achieving the required porosity. Our work is in commercial as well as space and military uses.”
Mr Hill said: “The team has excelled, working tirelessly with NASA and others to ensure Heathcoat was able to deliver on their requirements.”
‘Our fabric was selected by NASA for the successful Mars mission’ CAMERON HARVIE