Automation Industry Association

Fierce competition and an enormous cost pressure in the textile industry ask for an immense effort from machine manufactures for the textile industry. Those manufacturers will be successful who offer the required technological quality of machines and plants and meet the end customers' demands for high productivity, low "Total Costs of Ownership" and investment security. Here, the automation supplier is doubly challenged. It must support both machine and textile manufacturers with high performance products and solutions adapted to requirements with reliable services.

Historical:

The textile industry is one of the more automated industries. That has a tradition because mechanization began very early in the manufacture of textiles - just consider the punched cards in weaving. Of course, the degree of automation today depends on the location and the textiles to be manufactured. In Asia, for example, the basic clothing textiles are produced in very wage-intensive and therefore hardly automated productions. In Europe on the other hand, more and more attention is being paid to high-tech textiles but also to mass articles with the fastest and most reliable market availability for the technical field.

Future Trends:

Uniform solutions for the manufacturing process can help to reduce the time to market, further improve the transparency of the product quality, reduce the variety of types and parts, optimize maintenance measures or minimize training times and costs for the machine operators and are consequently in increasing demand.

Consistently Modular:

There is a trend towards modular machines and plants. They can contribute to a shorter project duration and higher engineering quality by using proven hardware and software modules. Here, distributed and intelligent drive components, in conjunction with tried and tested controllers and motion control systems, enable integrated concepts that guarantee the necessary flexibility in concept construction and individual combination of the mechanical machine components.

Example:

The requirements for textile finishing machines are high. Since increasingly frequent article changes are the rule in the production process due to shorter yardages, the machines are required to be highly flexible. Short changeover times help the finishers to react quickly to changed requirements. In addition, the replacement of mechanical systems by mechatronic solutions has proven successful particularly in finishing. This is achieved, for example, with drives with intelligent motion control, such as virtual masters for "split warp" on stretchers in a technology package. Here, the drives replace mechanical solutions; the gear is eliminated.

Clever modularization saves costs:

Profinet is becoming increasingly important. In that respect it is of course an advantage to the whole textile industry when automation manufacturers commit themselves to further development of the Profinet standard. Profinet enables not only the integration in the company system but also tele-maintenance or spare parts deliveries via the Internet are no longer a problem.

Direction:

For Indian Textile to have its pie share in the world market, Volume and large-scale production will be the mantra. The above, described trends will be the major factor for the success of large-scale projects.

Vipul Mehta