Wolf Aerolife®: Fiber Technology for the Next Millennium

As I walked into the new Wolf showroom in the Main building at High Point, Tony Wolf, company President and head cheerleader, was briskly walking out the door. “Joe, I’m off to a meeting, but you’ve got to check this out,” said Wolf as I stuck out my hand for a handshake. Tony was very animated and visibly excited.

“Pick up this futon (mattress),” he said. “You won’t believe it.” I picked it up expecting it to be lightweight. Hey, I had been talking to Wolf about this new technology for over a year, and he had told me when it was ready that it would be revolutionary. As I began lifting the futon mattress Wolf smiled and said, “Now lift it over your head,” and I did. I smiled, Tony smiled, Gary Cohen, the National Sales Manager smiled. If this new technology provided long term resilience like it delivered light weight then Wolf had a real winner, and maybe even more.

When I was doing the interviews for our Spring 2001 issue on the latest and greatest in futon mattresses my conversation with Tony Wolf was all about Aerolife®, yet the word Aerolife® was never used. At this point in the design and R&D curve Wolf was still in the late stages of product development and was doing trademark research on the name and tweaking the machinery for his new filling material. At that time Wolf said, “We are bringing a totally new technology to the category. This new process allows us to produce a cotton batt that is extremely lively and extremely resilient. This isn’t a new name, this is a totally new product.” Futon Life, V13 N1, Spring 2001

Wolf is now producing, at the Ft. Wayne plant, a revolutionary new product made with a first of its kind machine. “The guys who run our garnetts wear work clothes covered with cotton fibers and carry wrenches in their pockets. The guys that run the Aerolife® line wear technicians coats and run this equipment from touch screen computers. It is an amazing and wonderful opportunity to be involved with something as exciting and revolutionary as Aerolife®,” said Wolf. Genesis: Summer 1996— In The Beginning

Garnetting or carding cotton fibers into pads for futon mattresses, upholstery, seating, insulation, and many other uses has been the technology of choice for hundreds of years. “The same technology has been used for generations, and has essentially remained the same over that time,” said Tony Wolf. What the garnett does, in the simplest of terms, is comb the cotton fibers into an even and consistent horizontal lap. These laps are then piled one on top of another to a predetermined height and weight, depending on the end use specification, into a pad or mat.

“The thing about the (traditional) garnett is it takes the fibers and combs or lays them down horizontally. The horizontal orientation works great in many applications but has been the cause of my interest to find a better way to make a more resilient pad,” said Wolf.

Historically, Wolf Corporation has always produced cotton in a commercial context for a variety of markets. In some of the markets the compression issue, or the tendency of the cotton batting to lose a significant amount of softness and loft, has been called into question.

“It just seemed that no matter what we did combining fibers in the carding or garnetting process the finished padding wasn’t standing up to the tests being placed upon it by some of our commercial customers,” he said.

The issue, simply stated, was that unacceptable levels of compression occurred because while the process laid the fibers down horizontally all the end users of the products required vertical pressure resilience over the product’s useful life.

“We either had to fish or cut bait with these customers, some of whom were fairly large and significant,” he said.

With futon mattresses being a major consumer product bearing his name Wolf also had an internal futon manufacturing and retail dealer issue to contend with. All these various and compelling issues contributed to Wolf’s pursuit of solving this horizontal fiber orientation vs. vertical pressure during use conundrum?

Garnetting has remained essentially the same since the late 1700’s. Yet today with men landing on the moon and race cars screaming around tracks at 200+ miles per hour there had to be a way, in this modern computer age, to create a machinery process to reorient the fibers vertically and make a resilient, lightweight, and just plain better cotton batt.

The quest began.

Airlay circa 1966—Going Vertical

While George Harrison was singing Taxman and Bob Dylan was singing about how he didn’t want to work on Maggie’s farm no more the Rando Corporation, in Rochester, NY was developing the Airlay system. This process was the first ever attempt to take the horizontal fibers from the garnetting process and reorient them vertically.

“It seemed reasonable to assume in a world that had replaced the typewriter with the word processor that we could come up with a better way to make fiber padding for futon mattresses, upholstery, other seating and comfort applications, and that perhaps someone else had already begun working to that end,” Wolf said. The Airlay system took the basic product that comes off the garnett and ran it through a drum that pulled a high volume of air through the fibers thereby reorienting them to a 45° angle. This technology and the subsequent addition of heat setting cotton and polymer fiber blends along with other textile engineering applications made some significant improvements.

“The soldiers were beginning to stand up with the Airlay process but we were looking for a more significant and dramatic solution,” said Wolf.

Other improvements to the Airlay product came in the mid-seventies. Dr. Ernst Fehrer, founder and father of many needle punching technologies at Fehrer AG (holder of over 1000 patents) added some improvements and mechanical methodology to the Airlay machines but for Wolf it was simply not the solution he and his team were looking for.

“We’ve done a great job in making a fiber pad that has proper fiber orientation for assembly, but up until now, a lousy job in making a fiber pad that is oriented for the pressures of day to day use,” said Wolf. What everyone was doing was working with a technology that laid the fibers down flat on the horizontal plane and then play with those fibers to try and get them to stand up vertically after the fact.

Verti-Lap circa 1992—Close but no cigar

What if you took a standard garnett machine and had it redesigned to orient the fibers vertically? Sounds logical. Verti-Lap was a technology of the 1990’s and it existed in the Czech Republic.
“What these guys did was create a machine that simply carded the fibers vertically and then mechanically set them in a tight accordion-like crimp,” Wolf said.

Wolf looked at the Verti-lap machinery and it opened their eyes to some very solid possibilities, but nothing close to the final solution they were looking for.

“The web produced by the Verti-Lap process did everything we outlined at the beginning of this story. It clearly oriented the fibers in a 100% vertical orientation, but during our rigorous testing there were still some issues with resilience and compression,” said Wolf.

The Connection circa 1997— Looks like fiber, feels like foam

After looking at Verti-Lap Wolf reached a road block. Airlay was good, Verti-Lap was better, but nothing existed, or so he thought, that solved the twofold problem of vertical orientation of the fibers coupled with serious and long lasting resilience in day to day use.

But all that changed when a gentleman came to call with a new technology from Germany. Due to mandate by Mercedes Benz Automotive to build a totally environmentally friendly “green” automobile they had developed a specification that required their suppliers to produce a fiber fill to replace CFC foams. Fortuitously they were the exact specifications Wolf had been looking for. The problem was that the fiber fill was more costly than the foam and the development process had stopped there.

“When this guy came in and handed me the product I squeezed it and thought it was foam but it was polyester fiber,” said Wolf. “I wondered out loud what would happen if we mixed cotton and polyester together in this machine and the gentleman said, ‘Let’s find out.’”

Wolf, not being one to pass up an offer like this one, began to test various blends. The results opened more doors and looked promising.

As time went on Wolf and company became more sophisticated in their ability to test for the qualities they were looking for. During this testing process they discovered that the orientation of the fibers produced by this new process were not horizontal and not vertical, they were random.

“If you took a pad of note paper and looked at the sheets as they lie there this would be analogous to what the garnett produces. Everything in a horizontal orientation. If you stand the pad on end then you have a vertical orientation. That is what we thought we wanted when we began. Now if you tear each sheet off the pad, crumple it up (like you were going to throw it in the trash) and then somehow glue or bind all those random crumpled balls together you would have a pretty good idea of what we were getting from the existing machine,” Wolf said.

The process of collaboration and testing resulted in the development of a new machine which was designed by engineers in both Germany and the United States and which was assembled in Ft. Wayne at the Wolf Corporation facility. The first product to come off the new equipment in 2001 was close to spec and showed great promise, but certain elements were still missing and they went back to the drawing board once again.

“We were very excited when we saw the possibilities this new technology offered,” said Wolf, “But more work had to be done. We had a great soup but not the right seasonings.”

Alongside the Wolf development time line was the competitive race among other garnetters and textile fiber engineers to build a machine to produce a similar product as well.

The Answer circa 2001—Aerolife®

All things considered Tony Wolf is one happy camper. His Aerolife® product and technology reside at his company’s facility in Ft. Wayne, IN and he is working very hard at lining up his own production and marketing to the futon furniture trade, as well as creating spec products for testing by several other major customers.

“When you realize that you have been on the cutting edge of the development of a brand new technology in an industry that has been doing what it does essentially the same way for almost 300 years it is very gratifying,” said Wolf. “Today this new pad is lighter and more resilient than anything produceable out there in the fiber industry dollar for dollar, pound for pound, period. The technology has come so far that the garnett line that is right next to this new line looks like a Model T sitting next to a Formula One race car.”

New technology that produces a better product in a world that is not known to be technologically progressive puts Wolf in an interesting position. Aerolife® has many potential uses for padding, sleep surfaces, upholstery, and many other applications.

“Evenness is a key to performance,” says Wolf. “On this machine, unlike a garnett (which has only one or two electric motors running the whole mechanism), we have 37 inverter control motors that can be regulated by the onboard computers. There is a graph on one of the monitors the technician uses that shows weight and uniformity levels throughout the run. This machine holds uniformity in weight, height and width to plus or minus one half of one percent. That’s pretty exact. At the end of the day, from June to January, from one shipment of cotton to the next we are seeing very exact, very uniform, very consistent product all year in any season. This is why I am saying that we have entered a totally new world. That driver in that Model T Ford is going down the road just like the driver in the Formula One race car. But the comparison ends there. The garnett is doing 20 MPH. The Aerolife® line is doing 235, and we’ve only just begun,” Wolf said.

With many of the possibilities for this product and process still in the future Wolf is not content to sit down now and admire his handiwork.

“This a whole new ball game,” says Wolf. “We have people testing this product now that see this new fiber as an answer to a multitude of issues— not the least of which are weight to density ratios, flame retardancy, and cost savings. Aerolife® allows many futon manufacturers to look at natural fiber blends where before they had to look at foams and very exotic and expensive synthetics.”

Like he said, this is whole new world. And just think, the fabulous futon is still out there on the cutting edge.

FL