Polyester spun waxed or Incompetent Technicians.

How much an Industry works like a fool can be seen from the simple fact that even the best of the technologist working in the mills don't try to recall the basic chemistry that they learnt at High School.

I was yesterday looking at the imports into US on spun yarns and interestingly all the polyester spun yarn imported for knitting has the Term : " Polyester spun waxed for knitting "

If one has learnt his basic textiles correctly, then he knows that wax is a paraffin compound and actually has no lubrication effect whatsoever on polyester. In fact wax will not even stick to polyester spun or filament yarns . If wax works for cotton does not mean that it is also the lubricant for polyester.

Polyester is basically " Petroleum" converted into fibre and all man made fibers , the only lubricant is white oil with additives for anti splash, cohesiveness and heat dissipation.

The filament Industry religiously uses the white oil based lubricants, however, when it comes to the spun yarn Industry, the concept of lubricants is not matured. All cotton spinning variables are generally extended onto other fibre substrates without any thought on the basic chemistry of the polymer.

Interestingly wax is non water soluble and generally needs ether or benzene for washing out. The same polyester after knitting, when goes into dyeing, now will have undissolved wax which will inhibit the dyeing process and is one of the cause of shade variations. Though to my mind, wax will actually never get picked up at the yarn application stage itself, so one generally does not get these problems of undissolved wax in dyeing. In cotton dyeing, one of the biggest challenge is to dissolve the wax, before dyeing. The inner wax inside the cotton fibre is a major inhibitor in the dyeing process.

In the spun yarn Industry, while the cotton is subjected to Moisture Regain and maximized with water content to profit by selling water on yarn prices. The polyester spun yarn industry has been slow in realizing that there is hidden profit, when they oil the spun yarns via lubricators against waxing. All it takes is a small lubrication device to be installed on the winding machines and it does the needful.

The result is that the yarn is well lubricated, hence the yarn hairiness automatically improves , the performance on knitting machine then can be guaranteed to bring about higher speeds. These mill then can charge a premium for such a lubricant and profit double by selling oil at price of yarn .

I have made some oils which show remarkably performance on polyester and its blends and will soon launch globally.