Insan Sandang Indonesia becomes the First Company To Go For Sustainable Carbon Utilities for Twisting

Insan Sandang has chosen to use the Carbon Utilities for their Twisting Department in their new spinning project.

Mr Teddy, the Director, wants " Sustainability" as an integral part of his new venture and therefore chose the Carbon Tubes against Plastic Tubes for the Twisting Unit. Further, he awaits the standardization of the Ring Tubes in Carbon and would switch to these to make the complete plant free of Plastics.

Mr Mitra, the CEO of the company claimed that besides the " Sustainability" factor, the company will be to get 2.5 kgs knotless packages on TFO with the Carbon Tubes and this gets them 4% advantage over conventional utilities.

Insan Sandang becomes the first Textile company in the world to go the Carbon Utilities way . It will lead the Industry into a new era of Micro- structures for Materials in Motion with sustainable and cost efficient Advanced Materials.

I hope within the next 5 years, this becomes viral and a standard industry practice. The textile Industry will then enter the new era of Advanced Materials.

Twisting With Small Pots : Less Capital, Lower Operational Cost : Thx To My Patented Carbon Tubes

Never Twist with a pot dia of more then 120mm again. Kiss the bigger pots a good bye. And if you have larger pots on TFO, time to change the spindle to 120mm pots.

Till now, the 120 mm pot could hold only 850 gms of yarn and hence was non compliant with the market requirement of 1.89kgs cones with one knot.

Precision Assembly Winder with Mantex Carbon Tubes

  But this gets resolved with two solutions.

1. Using a Precision Winder to getting a better density of the yarn.
2. Using Carbon Tubes , which shaves off 5 mm thickness of the plastic tubes and give the extra room to give higher content.

Now you can get 1.1 kgs with 38 mm tubes on Precision Winder for 120mm pot diameter. Thereby giving 1.89Kgs++ packages with one knot, which are standard in the market. Though, if you are a little smart, you can get 1.2 kgs knot less on the 38mm tubes, but will need to manipulate the traverse to be around 160mm or a little more.

In fact, it given an opportunity for the machine maker to go down on the spindle size to be only 115mm, with a pot of 120 mm, which will give 950 gms as the pay load.

For Sewing Thread makers, this is a boon. They can take one to one 1200 gms knotless dyepackages directly on the TFO and no need to rewind on soft cone winders.

This practically means, the Investment in TFO project comes down by 25%.
Because, when you use a smaller pot of only 125mm ( VTS 10), the speeds go up by 25%. 

Say, if you want to put a plant of 40 TFOs, then one would actually get the same production as that of 150mm pot dia with only 30 TFOs of  125mm pot dia. And not only that, since, the pot is smaller, the operational cost comes down by 20 to 25% . Eg 40 TFOS of 160 mm pot dia will need USD250 per spl x 160 spls per machine x 40 machines = USD1.6 Million. And investments in drum assy winders : USD600 X 160 Spls x 4 machines ( Taking 1 spl of assy winder = 10 spls of Drum winder ) say USD400k. Total of TFO + Assy Winder = USD 2 million.
Now, take a 120 mm pot TFO, the nos of machines required only 30 for exactly the same production : 30 x USD 200 per spl x 160 spls = USD 960K, Plus Precision Assy winder : 4 machines x 100 spindles x USD1600 =  USD 640K. Total of USD 960K+ 640k = USD1.6 million Against USD2 million of large pot dia machines.  Which is 25% lower overall investement, besides the savings on the knotters, blowers, cables, space etc etc.

Now, if you have 40 TFOs , then all it takes is replacing the pot to 120 mm from , whatever pot size is there on the current TFO, And you sell off 10 machines and from the sales proceeds , fund the conversion of the other 30 machines to 120mm pot .

Power is a function of spindle size and the balloon in TFO. However, one has to find an optimum speeds for power savings as beyond a certain speed the power again goes up exponentially. Therefore, technically though 120 mm pots can go upto speeds of 14500 rpm. But the best speeds would be around 12,500 rpm. Which is still 25 to 30% against the big pots speeds of 9000 rpm.

Lower Capital For Same Production

As per above chart, the total investment comes down by 25%. Infact, the investment in TFO comes down to almost 66% of the original investment. However, one has to invest a little higher into Precision Assembly winders against Drum Winders. If you can get a good deal for the precision winders, then the investement becomes almost 40% lower then the large pot TFO with drum winders.

The savings are 

Power savings upto 25%.
Labor saving
Space Saving
Utility Saving
Trolleys, knotters, etc etc

Changing from large pot to 120 mm pot is very simple. Needs only spindle change. However, to get the real deliverable, one needs to have a precision winder or invest into a new precision winder.


This marks the end of Drum Assembly winders and opens the new chapter of small pots for Twisting. However, to get 1 kgs payload on the tube, only would be possible with my tubes. Thereby giving more then 1.89 kgs with one knot.

Twisting : Wasteful Power N Killer Sound

TFO Twisting is relatively new Technology. However, when it comes to the Machine Design, it is questionable.

First Twist : Between the Twist Tube and the Moving Spindle.

Second Twist : Between the package and the Moving Spindle .

In both the twist, the Moving Spindle is the Control Point. Higher the Speed of the spindle, more the production.

But, then Industry has found that beyond a certain speed threshold, the power consumption does not go up linearly, but geomaterically. So, here is a technology, which has inherent PPF limitations ( For PPF, read my post on Quality )

As long as the power cost are lower, this issue is not a limiting factor, however, as soon as the power cost does not justify the incremental benefit of productivity, the machine does not pass the Viability Threshold.

Machine makers did move recently in the direction of making smaller pot diameters to battle the high energy cost. But no sooner you go to a smaller pot diameter, the PPF of the Twisted Package reduces as the output is Knotted yarn, which the subsequent user does not want.

The machine makers did not see that the solution was in simply making 8 inches and 10 inches feed packages.

A 8 inches feed package machine will automatically give a 1.86 kg package without knot on a rather smaller spindle diameter, then a 6 inches package. And if it is 10 inches, then the spindle becomes far more smaller.

While Volkmann and Murata, both made smaller and smaller pot size and as low as 90mm, but not gone into designing a larger feed package simultaneously to make it a superior machine.

The argument given is that this will give a larger balloon and hence the power consumption advantage will get nullified. However, as per field experiments carried out by me ( We designed a 8 inches package and fed to a smaller pot dia, of only 135 mm and came up with a 1.86 kg package without knot) and we found that actually, the speeds could be taken up to 14,000 rpm with a productivity increase of 17% from a speed of 12,000 rpm and with no increase in power consumption. Plus the bonus of increase in efficiency in Assembly Winder.

Therefore, if One Knot is acceptable limits, then a pot dia of only 70mm is enough to take the speeds upto 20,000 rpm and bring in a productivity gain of around 100%. Buy the technology of hairiness control from me.

Though Volkmann does offer 8 inches feed package, but has never been able to successfully pitch it to the customers, on account of lack of facts and figures.

Further, why not have the balloon enclosed in a vacuumed environment to keep the balloon drag lowest.

Unfortunately, no work has been done in this direction. But general common sense would say, if you were to enclose the spindle in a vacuumed area, the air drag should be practically zero. Which would mean, enclose the spindle right till the balloon breaker guide and with a vacuum pump keep pulling the air out.

I have no experience with it, but can still say, that the balloon drag will significantly reduce and the power consumption drop.

Second.

The times of running spindles with Belt is over. Each spindle needs a simple motor drive directly coupled to the spindle. ( There are now motors avl to run at speeds of 100,000 rpm)

Third :

The take up does not need cams anymore. For a straight simple package, there are enough reversible motors available.

Fourth

The deafening sound of the machine can be better avoided by keeping the headstock outside the department and the main machine inside the department. ( Though, if individual motors are installed, this sound thing is naturally taken care). A good engineer will , however, also keep the Belt running below the floor level and cover the service area with a checker plate. The whole issue of Machine sound is covered. But only if the machine makers themselves have seriousness to advise the client for such simple solutions.

Fifth

Machines have to be Double Decker. Floor space is becoming very expensive and more and more mills have no room for expansion. This also permits more spindles being covered by the same operator,

Sixth

If power is such a major issue in Twisting, then why not provide on the panel a power meter. It cost now only Euro 100, but is a significant tool in the hands of the management to take the productivity up .

Seventh

Technology has to move further to Four For One Twisting. A Turkish Twisting machine maker has gone in to turn the take up drum and insert two twist. This gives a direct opportunity to make Four For One Twister. Two twist coming from the tail of the twister and two coming from the head of the twister.

Well, the biggest drag in innovation is sometimes the user himself. The user goes largely by Industry perceptions and less by his own experience. Unless and untill the user is ready to challenge the STATE OF BEING AND INNOVATE, most machine makers themselves cannot bring about any improvement.