Artificial turf, as a very popular new commodity in recent years, has laid a large number of artificial grass sports venues in the global market. According to the data, North America, Europe, and Asia, which account for 30%, 40%, and 20% of the global market share of artificial grass in recent years, will reach an increase of no less than 20%. The South American and Middle East markets grow most rapidly. Affected by the financial and COVID-19 pandemic crisis, Chinese artificial grass manufacturers play an important role in the global artificial turf supply.
The competition in the artificial grass industry is intensifying. In order to expand market share and maximize profits, a price war is inevitable.
In order to reduce costs and seize the market, many manufacturers do not hesitate to reduce commodity quality and replace inferior products with good ones.
So What are the criteria for judging the advantages and disadvantages of artificial turf?
At present, it is often judged by appearance, such as the cut of grass yarn is flat, whether the primer coating leaks glue and green, grass yarn pulling force, etc. According to the production experience of the ATIS industry, a premium artificial turf can be judged from the following four aspects:
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Manufacturing Process:
The production process of artificial turf includes four main processes: selection of raw materials, grass yarn extruding, turf tufting, and backing coating.
There are many factors affecting these four processes in the whole process. How to control layer by layer determines the quality of artificial turf. In addition, the stretch of grass silk (20% – 35% belongs to the normal range), breaking strength (≥ 110N) and tensile strength are the indicators to measure the quality level of artificial grass.
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Raw Materials
DiamosGrass uses high anti-abrasion LLDPE polyethylene (PE) material and unique formula to produce artificial grass yarn.
With a high service life of 6-8 years, the grass yarn is not only in good sports performance but also high tensile strength and excellent elastic memory.
However, there are indeed many artificial grass products dumped at low prices in the global market. They not only use recycled materials but inorganic substances. The cost of these materials is only 1/3 of that of high-quality materials.
In fact, the anti-wear performance and anti-aging performance of artificial turf will be greatly reduced, if a large amount of inorganic substances to the PE formula is added. The worse is mainly reflected in the adverse effects such as fading and reduction of tensile strength.
The grass blades would probably be powdered after use for a period of time. It is harmful because the players inhale powder during exercise. At the same time, the damaged grass blades also contain a large number of heavy metals, which seriously pollutes the environment.
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Backing Cloth
The turf backing cloth is the most important part of artificial turf. All grass blades are tufted on the backing cloth and fixed by glue coating.
Usually, a high-quality backing cloth is with aging resistance is 6 years. Meanwhile, it is 40% higher in the testing of the transverse breaking strength and longitudinal breaking strength than that of the common backing cloth.
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Glue Coating
The artificial grass back coating is usually coated with styrene-butadiene latex (SBR), which has good performance, gloss, strong adhesion, and suitable viscosity.
After coating, the artificial turf must pass the binding strength of tufting, wear test, the physical properties of the turf (turf breaking strength, bursting strength, tear strength), flame retardancy, and other tests.
Finally, the qualified products that passed the test shall be subject to rolling processing and packing for shipment.
In short, the quality of artificial grass can not be distinguished only by appearance, nor can it be compared only in terms of price. The easy way is to choose an artificial grass manufacturer that is authoritative in the industry, has a large-scale production base, has quality and reputation assurance, has a large number of sample projects, and is a supplier of large-scale games or projects.
