Lightweight protection
An idea that began as a way of reducing foam waste has opened up wide-reaching opportunities for apparel group MAS Holdings in the field of protective clothing for sports, health and wellbeing.
Sri Lanka-based MAS Holdings is one of the world’s most prominent manufacturers of sports, swimwear and intimate apparel. Through Silueta, its in-house technology hub, it has built up a high level of expertise in thermal moulding, developing patented technology, including licenced silicone flocking technology (which uses engineered functional prints to modify fabric modulus) and other techniques to support the core business.
Among the developments this has led to is a patented technique it calls Reaction Injection Moulding technology. A series of early applications in protective sports clothing have come to light using the materials MAS Holdings can create using this. Some have already stood up successfully to competitive action, including at last year’s delayed Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympics. Now the group is making many of the materials commercially available, with partner brands, under the name Impact 360 by Silueta.
Waste reduction
Lingerie remains MAS Holdings’ bread and butter, but it describes its production of sports apparel as having grown phenomenally over the last few years. Earlier this year, MAS Holdings made an announcement about important expansion plans in the coming years, saying, for example, that it intends to double its production capacity in Indonesia and in India before the end of 2024, but also making a specific reference to its intention to increase production of sports and performance clothing.
The company’s Reaction Injection Moulding technology was first developed as part of wider sustainability efforts, in this case to reduce foam waste created by thermal moulding. Soon the team caught onto the idea that the foam and material produced had features that would work well in the sporting world. These are materials that can absorb a high level of impact and vibration, while remaining lightweight.
“We have our own chemists,” explains Dr Dilan Fernando, Silueta’s general manager for research and innovation in impact protection. “And we have a lot of experience in making lightweight materials.” His colleagues found that the key for Silueta would be its ability to fabricate exactly the densities it requires because it is in a position to control the raw materials it uses. The density, weight, grammes per square-metre (gsm) of the fabric are some of the primary considerations before sourcing starts. For this project, it identified a low-weight product as paramount and built formulations with that in mind.
The team was able to find a sweet-spot, with low-weight solutions that are still able to provide adequate protection. The right balance is to give protection effectively but without over-engineering the product or making it too bulky.
Silueta does not work alone; it works closely on this project with a large?Europe-based chemical company that it has partnered with for years. This partnership is strong enough for its chemists to be able to spend time working in the partner company’s laboratories on specific projects when they need to. In return, the company has taken its partner into segments in which it has not worked before.
Field tests
Intense brainstorming about the best way to take the Impact 360 by Silueta technology forward identified sports as one of the best areas to consider. This was in addition to specific applications in industrial and health-and-wellness products. At MAS, there are over 100 athletes who have represented Sri Lanka at an international level, including both the Olympics and Paralympics. The team has worked with many of these athletes to develop the products, which have also been field-tested by the different brands.
Successful tests of prototypes in a variety of high-impact sports have provided valuable insight and led Silueta to the conclusion that there are unmet consumer needs for products like the ones it can help brands create using Reaction Injection Moulding. In rugby, an important product that it has developed with Canterbury, one of that sport’s most prominent brands, is a head-guard. Other rugby products include shoulder pads and padded baselayer shorts that offer protection in the thigh area. In basketball, elbow pads and knee pads are products that have emerged so far.
Seamlessly integrated
The biggest pain-point with many of the products already in use is that the protective material is not flexible enough. “Products already on the market all seem to require stitching around the protective padding and, wherever you have stitching, you have an allowance for the padding to start moving, meaning wearers are always having to adjust the pad after going into contact,” Dr Fernando explains.
He describes what the company’s research and development team has come up with instead as a method of seamlessly integrating the padding into the fabric itself. “It’s one piece, it’s next to skin and the benefits are mobility, flexibility and next-to-skin comfort,” he explains.
“Lightweight” and “functional” are other keywords the team uses to describe Impact 360 materials. Silueta’s solution to over-engineered products already in the market is to make lighter-weight products and to allow athletes to move and play as though they were not wearing any protective clothing at all. “We want them to have protection where it is necessary,” Dr Fernando continues, “but we also want them to have freedom of movement.”
Olympic and Paralympic success
The Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics proved to be a good showcase for some of the Impact 360 developments so far. Rugby athlete Kevon Williams wore the head-guard, now branded as the Canterbury Raze head-guard, while representing the US at the games.
A sports brand specialising in impact protection for women athletes, Zena Sport, used Silueta technology to develop a vest that Australia’s goalball team wore at the Paralympics. Goalball is a sport designed specifically for athletes with visual impairments in which, as the name suggests, players attempt to throw a ball into their opponents’ goal. The ball weighs 1.5 kilos and has noise-bells to allow players to use hearing and hand-coordination to locate the ball and, when defending, try to block it. During matches at the Paralympics, analysis has shown the ball can travel at speeds of up to 60 kilometres per hour and the players require protection. Silueta’s and Zena’s joint response is a protective vest, the Zena Z1, that players can wear under their team shirts.
Opportunities for sportswomen
In developing the protective vest, the company collaborated closely with the founders of Zena Sport, Brad and Donna Johnson, who recognised the need for an advanced protective vest for female athletes competing in the AFL, the Australian football league. Having understood the significant physical implications of impact sports due to their personal involvement with the AFL, Brad and Donna Johnson realised that female adolescents faced many rib and breast injuries that go unreported, despite their impact at a critical stage of physical development.
Start-up collaboration
This was a product that was not available in the market before, according to Silueta. Or the products that were there before were in what the company says you might call “a raw state”. What Zena has done is take two of Silueta’s patented technologies to make a hybrid product. The vest uses silicone flocking technology for comfort in the bottom band, where it touches the skin, and material developed using Reaction Injection Moulding technology to protect the ribs and the breasts.
No more silent suffering
Around 50% of women who play impact sports will suffer a severe breast or chest injury in the course of their sporting careers, according to research Silueta has studied and discussed in depth with academics in Europe and Australia who specialise in analysis of breast injuries in women’s sport. Research suggests only 10% of these athletes report those injuries to their coaches because they think there is nothing the coach can do.
The team points out that MAS Holdings has among its core values the empowerment of women and feels it has found common ground with Zena Sport.
Athletes at their peak
Other developments include hip, elbow and knee protection in training gear for goalkeepers in association football, which also includes muscle compression functionality thanks to Silueta’s silicone flocking technology. For the same sport, there is a new shinguard that complies with the regulations of the EN13061 standard but is lighter at 50 grammes than products on the market at the moment, which tend to weigh around 70 grammes. It can be integrated into a calf-sleeve that also provides muscle compression, meaning it will stay in place, reduce weight and help players avoid a build-up of lactic acid, allowing them to perform at their best for a longer period of time.
Another idea is an elbow protection guard for cricketers, which allows players to dive for catches and scramble to save runs without fear of suffering cuts and scratches. In all, Silueta’s Impact 360 materials are already in use in 20 different sporting disciplines, with more to follow.
Beyond sport
Health and wellbeing and industrial apparel possibilities are emerging too. A specialist Belgian clothing brand provides protective headgear for people with neurological conditions including epilepsy, autism, cerebral palsy and Parkinson’s disease. It now has baseball-style caps that incorporate Impact 360 technology.
Often, young people with epilepsy, for example, have to wear protection that looks a little like the caps amateur boxers use. Wearers have complained of feeling an element of awkwardness in school settings, leading to a reluctance to keep the caps on. This brand’s products look much more like street-fashion accessories. On top of that, Silueta finds that Impact 360 protection makes them more effective than memory foam. Whilst memory foam absorbs the first impact well, it takes longer to recover in the case of repeated impact. As such, when someone is having a seizure and hits their head on a wall or a table with a quick, repeated impact, Silueta’s high resilience, quick recovery foam is much better suited.
Silueta is on track to make the advanced materials that comprise Impact 360 available to a wide range of people, in sport and beyond, proving once again that waste material can add untold value, if you know what to do with it.
Lightweight mobility and flexible comfort are the benefits Silueta says athletes will experience when wearing protective clothing that incorporates its Impact 360 materials.
CREDIT: Silueta
