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Weaving Sizeless Cotton Warp Yarns - Progress Report #2
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ABSTRACT A real weaving test/trial of a size-less warp of singles cotton yarns was successfully conducted, to the best of our knowledge for the first time ever, on a commercial fly shuttle weaving machine under mill conditions. The results were most encouraging and, in fact, exceeded our expectations. During the current, second year of the project on sizeless weaving, we had the dropwires, heddles, and reed of a 52" wide Draper, X-P loom coated with TeflonR to minimize yarn abrasion during weaving. After mechanically refurbishing and tuning the loom, we first started weaving a conventionally-sized, control warp segment that had been wound on the top of the experimental sizeless warp section on the same loom beam. The conventionally sized portion of the warp was intended as a control. Although the control warp itself ran reasonably well, we had a very high number of loom stoppages mainly due to mechanical failures (associated with the picking and checking mechanisms) of the weaving machine. We spent a considerable amount of time adjusting and tuning the machine. At any rate, in early September (2001), we started our first weaving test/trial with the sizeless segment of the warp, which was a 30-tex, combed Acala cotton, rotor-spun yarn produced about a year ago [1, 2]. We are extremely pleased to report here that the test was a complete success and the results exceeded our expectations in the sense that not even a single yarn, among about 2000 being evaluated, failed or broke during almost 1 1/2 hours of machine running time, which indeed is an exciting new milestone in cotton textile processing. Although the fabric construction and structure were light, the loom was run at its normal speed. On September 6, we tried a 50% higher pick density (30 ppi v/s 20 ppi on September 5) and the loom still wove a fabric without a single yarn failure or breakage. On December 5, 2001, we ran a weaving test with 40 ppi and had no yarn breakage. That indeed was a remarkable accomplishment beyond our expectation. Although a slightly excessive yarn hairiness (perhaps caused by the yarn abrasion against the loom components) was observed, it absolutely did not interfere with either the (clean) shed formation or the (trouble free) weft insertion mode (shuttle). The yarn wove without difficulty into a 2/1 twill fabric of smooth hand. However, it may also be noted that this success was attained with a particular set of yarn and weaving conditions, which only indicates that the sizeless weaving is feasible and promising. We must conduct a number of additional investigations and weaving trials with other yarns, fabric styles, machines, and processing parameters and conditions to fully develop a new wholesome technology and a fundamental knowledge of sizeless weaving. |
©National Cotton Council, Memphis TN |
Document last modified May 20, 2002
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