Monday, June 25, 2012

Yarn Dyeing : Kiss RF Dryers Good Bye!

Technology has taken a new turn now. High Pressure Drying takes over from RF or steam drying.
All it takes a blast of Hot high pressure to remove moisture from the package and one gets nice and dried packages . This is the same old Pressure  Dryer , which has now become viable as RF dryers and hydro prices have soared. Only that now customers are viewing Pressure Dryer as a more friendlier system of drying .

This would mean, end of Centrifugal Hydro extractors and End of RF Dryers. No more pulling out packages from the yarn dyeing machine and loading on centrifuge and extracting 50 or more percent of water and then drying with Radio Frequency.

The energy cost of drying with high pressure dryers may be much lower then the combined energy used in Hydro and RF. Though , I am still searching, how much energy actually goes into it .However, the deliverable' s with pressure drying are much much better viz

Very Low Investment compared to Hydro And RF Dryer.
Atleast 15 to 20 workers reduced. ( For 10 TPD Plant )
Lower Energy consumption
No handling of packages any more
No damage of package in Hydro
No shape distortion in Hydro
No yellowness in RF Dryer
Lower Throughput Time
Efficient system
Heat Recovery
Space Saving


These are already too many deliverable' s of this  technology.

Currently, the machine makers are charging a huge sum for this equipment. However, if you are a smart engineer , you can design this system by yourself at 25% of the offer cost from machine makers. As usual, the current machine design as offered by the dyeing machine maker has bugs.  The dryer does not need a SS vessel. Air circulation does not need SS tanks. No compressor of any size has its air tank made out of SS. The water and the heat from the dried packages can rust the wall of the dryer and hence the inner wall can at best have an SS sheet lining or use some composites which are water and heat resistant.

Since, it is a simple technology, sooner or later, most people will understand and this will mark the end of Hydro and RF dryers.

This also means the return to the Mantex Dyesprings as Dyeing Center. Since the biggest hassle with metal springs was always the burn out rate in hydro extractors. Now that issues is resolved forever.

Those who will still not use compressed metal spring  package centers will only keep their cost of dyeing 25 to 40% higher on account of poor education and poor technical skills. Somehow the Winding machine makers do not know, how to manage a  mantex dyespring to run at high speeds and are misleading the yarn dyers to avoid metal springs for dyeing.

One has to be a big fool to ignore that each dye lot made on precision winders with plastic dyetubes results into a capacity under utilization of 25 to 40%.  It is like an airline, which takes 40% empty seats, because some supplier goes and tells him that quality of flight will be much nicer ,if he keeps the load lower.

 In fact, if only precision winding makers had sense, they would have found that with precision winding on dyesprings, the payload into dyeing machine improves both horizontally and vertically. Horizontally as now within the same diameter, they would pack more yarn and vertically, because packages will be compressed 25 to 40% . Overall payload will go up by 40% in case of cotton yarns and 60% in case of Texturized Yarns.  This would automatically justify higher investment against drum winders, which are generic competitor to Precision winders. But like I have written before, much of the machine makers themselves do not know about Textiles and the Industry ofcoarse refuses to use common sense . If Dyesprings dyed well for 50 years and that too with random winders, then surely it will have a far higher quality advantage with precision winders and will still give the higher thruput value to the dyer.

Companies Like Arvind Mills, Ashima , Mafatlal, Garuda Cotex , Abhishek, Welspun, Winsome, Anlima Yarns, ( B.Desh)  and hundred others for decades used Dyesprings on Precision Winders. And these are Global scale companies with very high quality and very strong work culture. But there are still some dyers, who get trapped into the plastic dyetubes for precision winders.

In any manufacturing set up, the throughput decides the final cost of manufacturing and any technology, which inhibits the thruput can never make profit sense . Do you own maths and see, that any plastic dyetube user loses more then USD1 million per year on account of under utilizing the capacity of dyeing machine. Only because some joker , somewhere in the world went and taught the dyer that plastic dyetubes give better results and the dyer as a flock of sheep followed him , without actually doing his own maths and quality evaluation.

We are not set of technologist or engineers, who have been taught to question and probe and research and then take intelligent decisions. We only take infantile pleasure in doing something, which others are also doing and believe that we are smart . Not realizing that it is this inefficiency which has bought today the Industry in Europe and US to a stage of non competitiveness against Asia and not the labor cost alone. And it is this inefficiency which is the biggest weakness of the big companies, that is being exploited by the small dyers, who manage to keep their cost lower and making the big companies run for their money.  I met a small dyer in Panipat this April and he said, it was because of the metal dyesprings, he could dye in a 200 kgs machine a lot of 300 kgs random wound packages, where as others were dyeing around 200 kgs with precision wound plastic dyetubes. The money flow had made him so rich that from a 2 ton dyer, he was now going into a 10 ton yarn dyeing plant.

Anyway, time to Kiss RF Dryers and Plastic Bobbins Good Bye Forever.









Thursday, June 14, 2012

Spider Web - Online Mill Management!

 Spiderweb   uses the software of OLAP and Data Mining. Many IT companies provide this software and it was relatively easy to plug in this system to any kind of machines and equipments in a mill. Rieter has come out with this solution and has called it Spiderweb. I don't know, if Spiderweb is generic for the software or it is the Brand of Rieter.

Secondly, with wireless IP being available so cheaply, the data can be monitored remotely even sitting in head offices several cities or countries away.

Interestingly, it also alarms the users, if the quality parameters deviates and this keeps the quality on auto check mode.

More important is the use of the raw data into meaningful interpretation of

Power Guzzlers equipment's and the changes done to cut the energy usage .
 Machine breakdowns and historical cost associated with it.
Quality linked to fiber input quality, machine variables, changes in accessories or any subjective control which needs to be monitored online in real time.
Efficiency monitoring in real time .

One could go a step forward and make changes online from a remote location to change speeds or parameters of the machine.

Now with only Robots missing from the scene, the whole mill can be  remote controlled from any location and run fully with artifical intelligence. Though can handling robots are now available in the market and hence soon we will already have cans being handled by robots. Rest is all about threading in on various machines. I reckon a gang of 15 to 20 workers will be already enough to run a spinning plant of 25K spindles.

The system is very simple and any mill can design it by themselves, if they have a good IT department. A sensor linked to the top rollers of all the machines gives the productivity and a sensor linked to the quality gadgets monitors the quality in real time. This data is then used by the OLAP software ( Online Data Processing )

Those vending ERP solutions for Textiles should make use of this opportunity and capture this very large market.

The system can work on any equipment , whether it is knitting or dyeing or spinning or weaving.

Further, Image processing data will soon take over the quality screening in real time .