First associations in listening to the term "textile" are generally products such as clothing, bed linen or home textiles. But textiles cover a much broader range of applications: From automotive to civil engineering and aerospace engineering. Often hidden or not recognizable at first glance, textile structures master technical challenges with high adaptability.

Our institute focusses on fundamental research on pioneering textile topics. Key issue of our investigations and developments is always the textile structure. Fibers, yarns and textiles were combined to a tailored-made material and product.
The textile knowledge as basis for such developments and research work is passed to students of the University of Stuttgart within the lectures offered by ITFT: They cover for example functionally equipped technical textiles, smart textiles using sensors to monitor humans and their environment or the further processing of textile materials into stiff high-performance components made of fiber-reinforced plastics.

In addition to material investigations our research includes also the development of automated manufacturing processes for individual fiber-reinforced composite components. In this respect, ITFT is responding to the rethinking of the design of such structures, which are only partially series products, but often also specific, single components, which must be adapted individually to the application load case. Exact knowledge of material characteristics and the possibility of adaptation in the manufacturing process are essential.