Hainsworth Protective Fabrics’ brand-new, pioneering technology called AGILE.
AGILE is a lighter weight textile for structural firefighting. Its new, innovative construction is made up of tightly woven ultra-fine yarns, resulting in a range of exceptionally durable fabrics with excellent thermal stability at a supreme low weight.
AGILE will be immediately available to customers across all of our PPE ranges.
AGILE emphasises the importance of comfort when it comes to firefighter safety. The fabric is constructed from ultra-fine yarns, including highly protective meta- and para-aramids, that give it a lighter weight of 180 gsm – over 15% lighter than TITAN. AGILE has also been designed to provide increased flexibility, allowing the wearer to move and react with reduced interference.
This lighter weight and more yielding fabric structure means that firefighters who wear AGILE are able to move more freely and more easily focus on the vital task at hand, allowing for prolonged endurance and enabling them to perform at their peak for a longer periods of time.
Despite offering exceptional comfort, AGILE still provides optimum thermal protection and durability. With 72.5% of yarns packed onto the fabric’s face and ultra-strong fibres on the back, AGILE has excellent abrasion resistance and can withstand over 100 washes without losing its protective qualities.
The tight gabardine weave gives the fabric maximum resistance to penetration by liquid chemicals, and prevents harmful particulates from passing through the garment as easily. Its high strength also means that AGILE lasts longer, potentially increasing the life of kit and saving costs in the long run.
Designed to perform in the most challenging of firefighting environments, AGILE gives firefighters confidence in all aspects of their protection.
Responding to the needs of firefighters across the world
Hainsworth has been providing protective textiles for over 150 years, when it first provided wool melton to the London Fire Brigade. Since then, it has been combining its historical knowledge of the innate qualities of wool with the latest cutting-edge fibres to create fabrics that combine protection, durability and comfort.
Colin Whittaker, Global Business Manager at Hainsworth Protective Fabrics said:
“We actively listen to firefighters and consider the risks, new and old, that they face on the job. While our TITAN fabrics are popular throughout the world, we are always thinking about how we can enhance our offering even further. Before developing AGILE, we spoke to firefighters about their structural kit to understand where they felt it could be improved to help them perform more effectively and safely. The overwhelming feedback was, ‘We feel confident with the level of protection our kit offers, but it could be more comfortable. What if we had structural gear that was lighter?’
“It’s feedback that is being echoed by firefighters across the world. Despite the emergence of newer occupational risks such as COVID, heat stress continues to be the greatest threat to a working firefighter’s life. In the face of this, it’s crucial that firefighters not have additional strain and resistance placed on them in active situations. If a garment is too heavy or otherwise restrictive, the wearer is more likely to develop fatigue or become overheated – hindering their performance and placing and own and others’ lives at risk.
“We’re not ones to shy away from a challenge, so we immediately started exploring how we could continue to give firefighters that optimum protection from heat and flame that they get from our TITAN fabrics while reducing the overall weight of the cloth. The result is the next generation of PPE fabrics – AGILE.”
For more information please contact Mark Van Dorsten at mark@pslfireandsafety.co.nz or 09 818 8048
