Textile manufacturing is perhaps one of the oldest known industries in India. It was in existence since the beginning of civilization, although a crude methodology has been used then. The total contribution towards textiles manufacturing in our country is approximately 20% of countrys industrial production and is also treated as the backbone of economy. This contribution is about 1/3rd of the foreign exchange earned by the government.

The textile engineering industries have reviewed the status of technologies being used in India and has recommended major changes to the Indian textile Industry about the technology being used by the companies to improve their productivity and quality.

The level of automation of textile machinery has undergone a tremendous progress and due to the efforts of indigenous textile engineering companies we are now at a stage where industrial nations are few years back and as more and more technologies are developed indigenously the cost of production, maintenance and spare parts is reduced drastically as these charges lead to the escalation of the price of the end textile product. With more and more indigensation of the textile machinery, we are bound to get the quality at a very competitive price and compete with the international competitors. Now with the help of government agencies more money is being spent on research and development to make the Indian textiles more attractive and consistent.

Automation of the Textile Manufacturing has become the catchphrase for the textile manufacturing industry. Automation does play a major role in quality improvement and cost effectiveness of the process of textile manufacturing. In the early 80s and 90s, the modernization and technical developments in textiles concentrated mainly on the automation of the individual machines and processes.

Throughout the 1990s, Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Flexible Manufacturing Systems have played a major role in the production of the textile and clothing industries, both in developing as well as the developed countries. All these textile-manufacturing units would like their industry to be fully automated without any scope for errors and rejections of the exports. The industry has slowly adapted to the modern computer applications in textile operations to the era of computer integrated textile manufacturing.

CIM is one of the pioneering technologies to provide accessible information for each and every phase and division of a plant for the efficient management of the various processes of production. Make the data available for planning and control at strategic points to the top managers and supervisors so that any problem can be rectified immediately at the ground level.

Fiber Manufacturing

A major direction for evolutionary change in extrusion technology is the continuing integration of extrusion with the downstream processes. These technologies place a great emphasis on material handling requirements; robotic technologies for package doffing etc.

The emphasis on flexible manufacturing in textile manufacturing has lead to some of the manufacturers developing robotic techniques in the rapid change and replacement of spin packs and spinnerets. With the help of robotic technology we can do things which otherwise would take a manual worker days to complete at his full potential even if he works for 24 hours a day. Some other examples of the utility of the robotic technology come into focus of replacing spare parts. With the help of robotic technology they can replace hot parts of the machinery, which any worker would not be able to do unless it cools down thereby saving time and production.

Yarn Manufacturing

Flexible Automation is being adopted even with Yarn manufacturing. The application of Integrated Manufacturing Systems are to monitor and/or control practically all yarn production processes from opening and blending to spinning, winding and twisting thereby ensuring 100% production.

Some of the applications of the automation in yarn manufacturing include inventory control, order tracking, maintenance control, budgeting, mill management and many other important functions in the yarn manufacturing process. Most of the top yarn manufacturing companies now use advanced controls on opening, blending, carding and other fiber preparation equipment, which are compatible with OM. Ring spinning machines with individual spindle drives offer great flexibility and will readily fit into the CIM concept. Sliver weights can also be controlled and the levels managed with the electronics connected to the computer network.

Fabric Manufacturing

Weaving and knitting machine builders have been blazing the trail in utilizing computer technology for efficient fabric manufacturing for many years with their use of CAD, bi-directional communication and artificial intelligence. With the availability of electronic dobby and jacquard heads, automatic pick finding, and needle selection, etc these machines can easily be assimilated into the existing computer networks of any production machines. The Bi-directional communication systems can be used to control multiple functions on a weaving machine. The textile automation system can be used to develop the fabric to be produced and the design can then be transmitted over the network to the production machines to get the desired fabric with the press of a button. With the advent of the latest computer technologies being implanted in the textile manufacturing process, the design instructions can even be sent by modem from one country to a weaving machine located anywhere else in the world. Today's weaving machines are capable of receiving and responding to instructions from anywhere and you can operate the machinery by even sitting in another country such as the kind of development that can be achieved with flexible automation. These technologies when implemented can reduce the time needed to produce a fabric and give true meaning to the automation in textile manufacturing.

In the early part of the 1990s, due to remarkable progress in computer technology, the application in sizing machines has increased to such an extent that multi-point thermo sensors for energy saving, automatic control of squeezing pressure, size pick up detectors, multifunctional counters, etc have been developed and successfully implemented in the textile manufacturing process. The sizing machine control systems provide a tool for management to ensure that all warps are sized uniformly and identically under standard operating conditions. These monitoring and control capabilities can be included even in a computer network of a weaving mill.

For many years now the knitting machine manufacturers have been making excellent use of latest automation electronics to provide machines that are more automatic and slowly over a period of time many refinements and advances have been made to these systems.

In the weaving line the automated process comprises of six production stages that include winding, warping, sizing, weaving inspection and packing and out of these stages there are 16 points of automation. Again out of these, 12 are related to the materials handling or transport and four applications deal with automating the machine operations themselves. This includes the automated process control the slasher and the weaving functions of (1) Automatic Pick Repair (2) Automated Warp breakage Locator and (3) Computerized Machine Control. But no doubt, manual assistance is still required for beam replacement and repair of the warp breaks.

Online Quality Control

The one and only factor for success of an automated textile mill is online quality measuring, monitoring and controlling practices. Now more and more companies are implementing the modern technologies to monitor the quality of the product at each and every stage, so that in case of any problem, it can done at that stage itself rather than after the product output has been done.

The importance of online monitoring and quality control cannot be over emphasized as the online monitor would incur huge expenditure to the company and the production also should be inline with the implementation of the online quality control process.

With the current technology one could now produce million pieces per day and if any defect is not identified at an earlier stage or process the whole output would go down the drain which results in wastage and unnecessary expenditure to the company. So the online quality automation process is a must for any textile manufacturing line. Should the off-standard material remain in the production line, further deterioration in product quality can take place, foreign-matter, broken filaments or unevenness can be found in the downstream processing.

Some times there is a problem of machine stoppages for long periods of time if the detection of the problem is not done very that stage itself, then it would adversely affect the production of the day. To achieve the premium quality it has become imperative for the textile manufacturing companies to incorporate online quality detectors that can measure quality on a regular basis and adjust machine settings within prescribed tolerances to maintain all the nominal quality parameters prescribed. In the event that the instruction is not being followed then stoppage production is done and correction is made manually.

The more recent advances in the field of imaging technology have fructified into inexpensive, high quality image acquisition and advances in computer technology now allow for image processing to be performed quickly and cheaply. This has given rise not only to a number of developments for laboratory quality testing equipment for fibers, yarns and fabrics but also it is playing a major role in the development of online equipment for continuous monitoring of quality in textiles such as Fiber Contamination Eliminator, Intelligent Yarn Grader and Automatic Fabric Inspection etc.

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