Air-Laid & Wet-Laid Nonwovens Directory

Two Ways to Lay a Web

In air-laying, dry fibres are opened, metered and blown or drawn onto a moving screen, where they land in a random, lofty mat. The classic raw material is fluff pulp — short wood fibres hammer-milled from a pulp sheet — often blended with synthetic binder fibres or superabsorbent granules before the mat is bonded with latex, heat, or both. The result is a soft, bulky, highly absorbent web that can be made at very even weights, which is why air-laid material dominates absorbent cores and tabletop and wiping products.

Wet-laying is papermaking adapted to longer, synthetic fibres. Fibres are dispersed at very low consistency in water, flowed onto an inclined wire, dewatered and dried, then bonded. Because water carries fibres so evenly, wet-laid webs are exceptionally uniform and isotropic — similar in strength in every direction — and they accept glass, aramid, polyester and other fibres that air cannot handle well. Wet-laid plants look like small paper mills, and many wet-laid specialists grew out of the paper industry.

Where Air-Laid and Wet-Laid Webs Work

Air-laid webs earn their place wherever absorption and softness matter together: absorbent cores in hygiene products, food pads, medical underpads, industrial and household wipes, and tabletop napkins that feel closer to cloth than to paper. Wet-laid webs dominate precision jobs — engine and high-efficiency air and liquid filtration media, battery separators, gasket and friction materials, roofing and construction carriers, and specialty industrial sheets where uniformity decides performance.

The directory below lists the producers this section carries for these technologies. The lead listing, Hollingsworth & Vose Company of the USA, describes wet-laid, dry-laid, meltblown and composite capabilities supplying filtration, battery separator and gasket applications — a fair picture of the wet-laid side's technical end of the market. Other listings span absorbent-product makers, filtration specialists and smaller regional producers, each with the description stated for it.

Choosing Between the Two Routes

The practical question is what the web must do. If the product must absorb many times its weight and feel soft, air-laid is usually the shorter route; if it must filter to a rating, separate a battery reliably for years, or hold tight tolerances in a thin sheet, wet-laid is usually the answer. Basis weight range, fibre cost, line speed and bonding chemistry all feed the decision, and many converters buy both webs and laminate them into composite products.

Buyers specifying either web should ask for basis weight, thickness, absorbency or pore-size data measured to a named test method, and should test converted samples — a web that performs on the roll can behave differently after embossing, laminating or die-cutting. Use the listings below to reach producers directly, and the sibling directories in the chips below for the neighbouring nonwoven families, from meltblown filtration media to spunbond coverstock.

A Note on Composites and Blends

In practice the two routes are often combined rather than compared. A wet-laid glass or synthetic sheet may be laminated to an air-laid absorbent core; an air-laid web may carry a wet-laid facing for strength; and producers with both technologies — several are listed below — sell the combination as a single engineered material. The composite is usually worth more than either web alone, because each layer is made by the process that suits it best.

Fibre developments keep widening both routes: finer synthetic fibres for wet-laid uniformity, bio-based and recycled fibres for air-laid absorbency, and binder systems that cure faster and smell less in the finished product. Buyers who last specified these webs a decade ago will find the current datasheets noticeably better in uniformity and strength at the same weights — one more reason to re-sample from the producers below rather than reorder an old grade by habit.

Air-Laid & Wet-Laid Producers Listed Here

24 companies and organisations are listed in this directory, each with its country and a description of its products and processes. Follow a name to the company's own website.