Total Testing Center: Managing productivity throughout the mill

How spinners can achieve the critical balance between input and output.

Spinning mills today are expected to transform incoming raw material that fluctuates in quality and cost into a consistent yarn that exactly meets the needs of customers. This difference between input and output is the critical balance which determines customer satisfaction, market reputation and ultimately the mill’s own profitability – and ideally this balance is optimised by a sophisticated system.

One of the challenges for spinners today is the cost of failure to manage quality at each stage of production, and especially of preventing ‘good’ material being wasted. This can be huge, running into hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Yet, besides the savings, the opportunities arising from proper management of the mill with quality in mind are equally great – and yet totally aligned with USTER’s unique Think Quality approach.

As an example, a typical 40,000-spindle mill might produce 12.5 million kg of Ne 30 combed yarn over two years. With conventional quality detection procedures, the mill will be rejecting large amounts of waste – a proportion of which could actually be perfectly usable if the process was optimised with the full set of data. Fibre ejected in blowroom control of foreign matter content might produce 168 million ejections over the two-year period. In combing, 2.9 million kg of noil will be generated. Additionally, the mill could expect 20 million end-breaks at ring spinning, and then still find as many as 760 million defects needing removal by yarn clearers in winding.

Realistic possibilities now exist for optimising this waste for example, blowroom ejections by 10-20 per cent would be feasible, comber noil by 0.5 per cent, end-breaks in spinning by 5 per 1,000 spindle hours and winding splices by 5-10 per 100 km. There is a potential of a total saving to the mill over the two years’ production of $200-250,000.

One system, covering all processes

A single quality management and control system capable of guiding mills towards these quality and productivity improvements might seem to spinners like an impossible dream. In fact, the ideal begins to become a reality, with the Total Testing Center, now available with the new USTER® TESTER 6. The keyword is ‘Total’ – with the integration of laboratory and in-production data across the entire mill. It is one solution, with the essential multi-process coverage that enables intelligent optimisation of each department. From bale laydown to ring spinning and winding, information from each process stage is inter-linked to others, and to the whole.

Connectivity across processes

The Total Testing Center aims to bring together all the vital quality data from USTER® systems, with the advantages increasing for the spinning mill with each USTER® instrument connected to it.

The following are some of the possibilities:

The ring spinning process itself is the single most labor-intensive operation in the mill, so optimisation here, for example, will bring significant benefits. The USTER® SENTINEL monitoring system will link into the Total Testing Center to provide analysis of the three-way relationship between raw material, ring spinning performance and quality data from yarn clearers at winding. Its results will facilitate improvements in several aspects of ring spinning performance, including productivity, and streamlining operative workloads for best use of labor etc.

The latest USTER® QUANTUM 3 Anniversary Edition yarn clearers not only provide a final-stage report on yarn quality by feeding data into the Total Testing Center, they also link with measurements from the USTER® TENSOJET strength tester for yarn performance prediction.

In the laboratory, the new USTER® TESTER 6 combines data gathered through the Total Testing Center to provide the prognosis guidance for fabric appearance and weaving performance and additionally predicting the level of pilling which can be expected. USTER® TESTER 6 also provides quality comparisons, matching yarn lots and end-uses to highlight any differences. Using USTER® STATISTICS figures, spinners can then check that their entire yarn production will achieve the required quality for each application.

By linking the USTER® AFIS fibre testing instrument to the Total Testing Center, spinners can optimise waste in spinning preparation. This system also helps to fine-tune production and pinpoint quality issues in other areas, such as correcting carding and comber settings.

As described, access to Total Testing Center, and connecting multiple USTER® instruments to it, means that spinners for the first time have the information they need to take total control of their quality and productivity. Besides adding to the capability, it gives the confidence to make the right decisions, for sustained profitability and satisfied customers. With more connections to come, for the Total Testing Center the future is just beginning.

The Uster Group is the leading high-technology instrument manufacturer of products for quality measurement and certification for the textile industry. The Group provides testing and monitoring instruments, systems and services that allow optimisation of quality through each individual stage of textile production. This includes raw textile fibres, such as cotton or wool, all staple fibre and filament yarns, as well as downstream services to the final finished fabric. The Uster Group provides benchmarks that are a basis for the trading of textile products at assured levels of quality across global markets. The Group’s aim is to forward know-how on quality, productivity and cost to the textile industry.

The Group is headquartered in Uster, Switzerland and operates through a worldwide Market Organization complemented by Technology Centers. It has sales and service subsidiaries in the major textile markets and Technology Centers in Uster (Switzerland), Knoxville (USA) and Suzhou (China).

For further information: www.uster.com