Business

How Uster’s Total Testing Centre Helps Spinners Manage Quality And Productivity

Spinning mills today are expected to transform incoming raw material which 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 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 savings, there are also opportunities to achieve quality arising from proper mill management.

For example, a typical 40,000-spindle mill might produce 12.5 million kilos of Ne 30 combed yarn over two years. With conventional quality detection procedures, the mill will reject 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 a two-year period.

In combing, 2.9 million kilos 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.

However, realistic possibilities exist to optimise blowroom ejections by 10-20%, comber noil by 0.5%, end-breaks in spinning by five per 1,000 spindle hours and winding splices by 5-10 per 100 km. There is a potential to make a total saving to the mill over the two years’ production of $200-250,000.

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.

Such an ideal becomes a reality, with Total Testing Centre, 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 a solution, with an essential multi-process coverage which enables intelligent optimisation of each department. From bale lay down to ring spinning and winding, information from each process stage is inter-linked to others, and to the whole.

The Total Testing Centre aims to bring together all vital quality data from USTER® systems, with increasing advantages for the spinning mill with each USTER® instrument connected to it. Some of the possibilities are as explained below.

The ring spinning process itself is the single most labour-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 Centre 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 labour.

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 Centre, but 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.

It also provides quality comparisons, matching yarn lots and end use to highlight differences. Using USTER®STATISTICS figures, spinners can check if their entire yarn production will achieve the required quality for each application.

By linking the USTER®AFIS fibre testing instrument to the Total Testing Centre, 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 the Total Testing Centre, 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 Total Testing Centre, the future is just beginning.