There are many types of fabric, let’s narrow it down to two broad classes and the strongest in each category, at present we have natural fabrics and synthetic. In natural fabrics, we have plant-based like cotton, flax, hemp and jute. We also have animal-based in the like of leather, wool and silk. While manmade or synthetic in nature textiles are polyester, nylon, acrylic and polyethylene. This kind of fibre is produced through a chemical process from plastic, gas, petroleum, alcohol, water, and air.
Plant-based natural fabrics are abundant in the textile industry, though cotton is the most popular and commonly produced, linen from the flax plant is deemed to be the toughest among the plant-based fibres. It has a characteristic of getting better in age too. Under a scientific test, it is 30% stronger than cotton.
Linen is a tough material that turns into a softer and stronger fabric the more that it is used. The linen fibre easily discharges moisture into the air, which keeps you cool. Moreover it is non-allergenic and the flax plant requires considerably fewer fertilizers than other crops and is both ecological and biodegradable.
Animal-based are equally natural fabrics and in this field, you’ll be amazed that spider silk is the strongest of them all. Silk may be prone to damages thru scratching, but it can withstand a tensile strength of 1.3 gigapascals (GPa). A pascal (Pa) is the SI unit for pressure defines as one newton per square meter and silk can take 1.3 billion pascals of pressure.
Spider silk is difficult to gather compared to the silk-spinning organisms such as silkworms. Even though techniques have been established to collect silk from a spider by force, it is still hard to get a significant amount to produce fabrics. In this case, spider silk is very hard to come by. Among the synthetic fabrics, ultrahigh molecular weight polyethylene or polyethylene is the most dominant one when it comes to durability. Polyethylene is lightweight, high-strength oriented-strand gels spun through a spinneret and can yield strengths as high as 2.4 GPa.
To sum it all, polyethylene is the strongest fabric today. Though it is synthetic, it is still good as long as we use it properly to avoid damaging the environment. We could always recycle this substance since it will take hundreds of years before it degrades. Getting the strongest material without sacrificing nature should always be the paramount goal of every commerce practice.
There you have it, the strongest fabric in each category, it is only a matter of personal perception in choosing what kind of material you will use in your home and furnishings. When shopping for fabrics, come to Yorkshire Fabric Shop where we showcase to you the strongest fabric available in the market today.