EMPEL™

EMPEL™ is a patented environmentally friendly sustainable high-performance fabric finishing technology. Utilizing a water-free application process and non-toxic chemistry, EMPEL delivers enhanced water repellency, finish durability, total breathability and soft hand feel, compared to traditional finishes.

EMPEL is a patented environmentally friendly sustainable high-performance fabric finishing technology. Utilizing a water-free application process and non-toxic chemistry, EMPEL delivers enhanced water repellency, finish durability, total breathability and soft hand feel, compared to traditional finishes. 

EMPEL completely transforms the environmental impact of textile finishing while offering unparalleled performance. Fabric production is the second largest water polluter in the world, quietly polluting trillions of liters of water every year. Traditional wet fabric production methods require significant energy to dry the fabric and generate waste streams that must be treated downstream. EMPEL is safe, PFC free and independently certified by Oeko-Tex® to meet or exceed global safety standards. The EMPEL water-free process eliminates water pollution caused from fabric finishing.

 
 

Traditional wet finish water repellent treatments stick chemistries unevenly between the fibers. These non-uniform coatings quickly wet out, wash off and cause fabrics to feel stiff. With EMPEL, the repellent chemistry uniformly wraps each individual fiber and is polymerized in place to create a durable molecular bond to the textile. Fabrics treated with EMPEL don’t wet out in heavy or prolonged rainstorms. The uniformly bonded chemistry ensures a highly repellent surface in even the most severe tests while not impairing the inherent breathability of the fabric. 

Left: EMPEL Dry Finish. Each fiber is independently coated.
Right: Traditional Wet Finish.
 
Our competitive product testing shows textiles treated with the EMPEL water-repellent technology absorbed about ⅓ the amount of water compared to the best Cø and C6 water-repellent market solutions. Equally impressive, EMPEL kept water from passing through the fabrics WITHOUT the use of a membrane. Using the same woven textiles for testing in a ten-minute rain test, only 2mL of water passed through the EMPEL-treated fabrics compared to 325mL from the Cø and C6 competition.  
 
 
PROCESS: “Dry Curing” is the water-free, solvent-free process of taking our base monomer chemistry and turning them into polymers at the sight of the fibers. The EMPEL process uses thermal curing to create a molecular covalent bond between monomers and the fibers in the fabrics treated with our patented “Clean Chemistry”. Thermal curing is accomplished by passing EMPEL™ treated fabric through a heated zone. The heat the fabric is exposed to causes molecular bonding and polymerization. 
 
Once cured, the EMPEL-treated fabrics remain stable and durable for the life of the fabric.  True polymerization causes bonding of the EMPEL polymers to the fabric.  This greatly improves the laundry durability and prevents the breakdown of the polymers on the treated fabrics. (When clean fibers are treated with the EMPEL™ finish, the finished polymers will not wash off, rub off, or wear off.) 
 
 
Haartz is proud to be the only company in North America to hold a license for EMPEL. Contact us today to learn more about our capabilities.

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