ABSTRACT
The centuries-old, global traditions of sizing a cotton warp for weaving and then desizing the greige woven fabric for quality bleaching, dyeing and finishing are costly, complex, and now considered environmentally sensitive. This is so, because these two textile manufacturing processes require a lot of expensive energy, water supply, waste water treatment and discharge, and, more importantly, chemical formulations that are complex and not benign to our environment. Thus, obviously for good reasons, the textile industry would like to eliminate, if at all possible, these age-old processes by essentially eliminating the main, underlying process of warp sizing. The scientists at Southern Regional Research Center have been asked to conduct research under a new CRIS to explore sizeless weaving. They have come up with some new ideas and concepts about the sizeless weaving, which is the subject of this paper. The paper basically summarizes the proposed research and has two purposes. One is to disseminate our thinking about the sizeless weaving and the other and perhaps the more important one is to seek an input in the form of any comments or new ideas from the readers, which would assist us in the research project. Although the goal of the proposed research is to develop a wholesome technology involving all aspects of yarn spinning, preparation and weaving, which ultimately would enable weaving on a modern high speed weaving machine a cotton or a predominantly-cotton warp without or with a reduced amount of the traditional size, a special emphasis is on the yarn setting without the traditional size film and on the importance of attaining a consistent tension of individual yarns on the loom beam.
|