How is Artificial Turf Made?

Overview and Background

Image via docturfinstallers.com
Artificial turf is used in sports to imitate actual grass. It was originally thought of in the 1960s by the Ford Foundation to be installed in urban areas to give children a better playing surface. It later became used in major sporting arenas where natural grass will be constantly torn up and impossible to maintain. The first use of artificial turf was used in 1966 at the Astrodome in Houston, Texas. That is where the commonly known name "AstroTurf" comes from.

Artificial turf is very similar to a carpet, in that, there is a backing, usually made of polyester tire cord, and fibers, usually made from nylon or polypropylene. First they take all the materials and mix them in a hopper. They add a green dye to give the grass as natural of an appearance as possible. It then gets fed into a steel mixer until it becomes thick. It is then sent through and extruder and becomes a thin and extremely long strand. The strands are then placed in a carding machine and become loose rope that gets woven into yarn and wound onto spools. The Yarn is then taken to a tufting machine and fed through a tube towards the needle. The needle pushes the yarn through the backing of the turf. A hook grabs and releases the loop of nylon as the needle pulls back. The backing then moves forward and the process happens again. The machine has several hundred needles and can produce multiple hundreds of rows per minute. The completed carpet is now passed under a latex dispenser for a coating on the underside of the backing. A secondary backing is coated with latex at the same time and then the two are passed through a marriage roller, sealing them together. Then it is placed under a heat lamp to cure the latex. The final step is passing it through a machine that makes sure everything is uniformly cut. Then they are placed on rolls and shipped out.

Installing artificial turf is fairly simple. The concrete or hard soil, on which it is being placed, must be smoothed out and made even. If it is being placed outdoors, a drainage system needs to be installed so no rain water collects on the turf. The turf gets laid down and then filled with a mixture of crumbled cork, rubber pellets, and/or sand to give the blades more support. This gives the turf a more natural feel.