Nonwoven fabrics underpin essential products in hygiene, healthcare, filtration, mobility, and construction. Unlike woven or knitted structures, these engineered webs are formed directly from fibers or filaments and then bonded to deliver specific performance. Mastering the main production routes helps you choose the right balance of strength, softness, porosity, barrier, and cost. This guide walks through the Top 10 Nonwoven Manufacturing Processes with clear explanations of how each web is formed, bonded, and finished. From fast, high throughput filament systems to precise fiber entanglement and binder chemistry, you will see where each method shines and how manufacturers combine them to meet demanding specifications.
Air-laid
Air-laid forms a web by dispersing short fibers into an air stream and depositing them evenly onto a moving screen. The process delivers a lofty, uniform sheet with excellent bulk and absorbency because fibers are laid with minimal compression. Manufacturers can blend wood pulp with synthetic fibers, superabsorbent particles, or bicomponent fibers to tune softness, fluid uptake, and integrity. Bonding is often achieved through latex binders, thermal bonding of bicomponent fibers, or a combination. Air-laid excels in wipes, absorbent cores, tabletop, and packaging pads where thickness matters. As part of the Top 10 Nonwoven Manufacturing Processes, it offers scalable productivity and great basis weight control.
Spunbonding
Spunbonding starts by melting a polymer such as polypropylene, extruding continuous filaments, drawing them with air for strength, and laying them randomly onto a conveyor. The freshly deposited web is then thermally point bonded using engraved calender rolls that create discrete bond sites. This yields a strong, uniform fabric with good dimensional stability and excellent process economics at high speeds. Additives enable UV resistance, hydrophilicity, or flame retardancy, while online lamination produces multilayer SMS structures with meltblown for barrier and breathability. As one of the Top 10 Nonwoven Manufacturing Processes, spunbonding dominates hygiene backsheet, agricultural covers, and geotextiles thanks to durability and low cost.
Thermal Bonding
Thermal bonding fuses fibers at contact points to create integrity without resins. Two common approaches are calender bonding, which uses heated patterned rolls to form discrete bonds, and through air bonding, which passes hot air through a lofty web to melt the low melting sheath of bicomponent fibers. Through air bonding preserves bulk and softness, ideal for topsheets and air-laid cores, while calender bonding offers thin, strong fabrics. Thermal bonding requires a thermoplastic component and careful control of temperature, pressure, and dwell time. As featured in the Top 10 Nonwoven Manufacturing Processes, it provides clean, efficient bonding and pairs well with spunbond and carded webs.
Needlepunching
Needlepunching mechanically entangles fibers using boards of barbed needles that penetrate and withdraw thousands of times per minute. The barbs drag fibers and lock them together into a robust network without heat or chemicals. Process variables include needle density, stroke depth, penetration frequency, and feed orientation, which together tune thickness, drape, and tensile strength. Crosslapping multiple carded webs builds isotropy or directional strength. Needlepunching accepts recycled fibers, glass, aramids, and naturals, making it versatile for geotextiles, automotive carpet, insulation, and polishing felts. Within the Top 10 Nonwoven Manufacturing Processes, it stands out for flexibility and equipment that scales from lab lines to wide industrial widths.
Hydroentangling
Hydroentangling, also called spunlacing, uses fine, high pressure water jets to drive fibers around each other and through the web thickness, creating strong entanglement. The process maintains excellent softness and drape because no thermal melting or binder is required. Producers control jet pressure, orifice density, manifold count, and support wire patterns to tune strength, thickness, and surface texture. Blends of viscose and polyester are common for wipes, while lyocell and cotton offer higher sustainability. Patterned apertures and embossing can be created directly during entanglement. As one of the Top 10 Nonwoven Manufacturing Processes, hydroentangling is favored for medical gowns, wound care, and premium consumer wipes.
Meltblowing
Meltblowing produces an ultrafine microfiber web by extruding polymer through dies while attenuating the filaments with hot, high velocity air. The resulting fibers are submicron to a few microns in diameter, yielding enormous surface area and small pore size enabling outstanding filtration efficiency. Because the web is low in strength, it is often laminated between spunbond layers to form SMS or SMMS fabrics that balance barrier and breathability. Process tuning spans die temperature, air flow, die to collector distance, and electrostatic charging. Among the Top 10 Nonwoven Manufacturing Processes, meltblowing is central to respirators, HVAC filters, sorbents, and battery separators where fine capture is critical.
Stitch-bonding
Stitch bonding integrates a fibrous web with a yarn system using modified warp knitting machines that create stitches through the web. The stitching supplies mechanical reinforcement and dimensional stability, while the underlying web provides coverage, loft, or functional additives. Producers can incorporate foams, films, or scrims and use different stitch patterns to adjust extensibility, hand, and aesthetics. The method handles recycled fibers and mixed materials, since reinforcement comes from yarn rather than fusion or binders. As part of the Top 10 Nonwoven Manufacturing Processes, stitch bonding finds roles in mattress ticking, automotive laminates, roofing, footwear, and composite preforms where tailored reinforcement and drape are desired.
Wet-laid
Wet-laid nonwovens adapt papermaking principles to fibers beyond wood pulp, dispersing short fibers in water, forming on a wire, dewatering, and drying. The outcome is a very uniform sheet with precise basis weight control and excellent formation, ideal for thin, smooth, and tightly controlled products. Glass, polyester, aramid, and specialty cellulose fibers are common, and binder addition during formation or at the size press adds strength. Careful chemistry prevents flocculation and maintains dispersion. As one of the Top 10 Nonwoven Manufacturing Processes, wet-laid technology serves battery separators, tea bag paper, medical drape, wallcoverings, and filtration media where uniformity and porosity must be tightly managed.
Electrospinning
Electrospinning uses a high electric field to draw polymer jets from a charged solution or melt, thinning them into nanofibers that deposit on a grounded collector. The resulting webs possess extreme surface area, nanoscale pores, and tunable chemistry for advanced membranes, sensors, and biomedical scaffolds. Process levers include voltage, flow rate, tip to target distance, ambient humidity, and solvent volatility. Production throughput has historically been modest, but multinozzle and needleless systems are expanding capacity. Within the Top 10 Nonwoven Manufacturing Processes, electrospinning enables high value functions and energy storage separators where nanoscale design is decisive.
Chemical Bonding
Chemical bonding builds strength by applying binders that form bridges between fibers during curing. Typical systems include styrene butadiene latex, acrylics, and polyurethane dispersions selected for flexibility, wet strength, or chemical resistance. Application methods such as saturation, print bonding, or spray target specific zones to preserve softness and porosity. Formulation must balance binder level, crosslinking, and add-on with desired hand and breathability, while minimizing residual monomers and emissions. Chemical bonding works with natural fibers and blends that cannot be thermally fused. As highlighted in the Top 10 Nonwoven Manufacturing Processes, it supports wipes, industrial wipes, interlinings, medical disposables, and household products with reliable, reproducible performance.