ITMA 2007 – A big success for Power-Heat-Set
September 26th, 2007 | In trade fairs | No commentsAuthor: Peter Resch
The exhibition ITMA is considered to be a “Place for Innovation”.
Power-Heat-Set used this opportunity to present a new heat set process for the carpet industry, which is unparalleled with respect to many aspects of the state of the art, which made the ITMA 2007, not only to a “Place for Innovation”, but for the carpet sector also a “Place for Surprise”.
Many visitors came to the booth of Power-Heat-Set to look at the new heat setting machine. This machine is a completely new system, not only a further improvement of existing technique.
In the compact heatset process the exactly arranged yarn (the yarn bundle) is wound up to a kind of hollow tube having the form of a screw thread. In this form the yarn then runs top-down through the process chamber filled with saturated steam. Every coil of yarn rests only on 4 thin pins which in turn are fixed to 4 conveyor chains. Consequently the yarn coils are led through the process chamber with minimal supporting points. The steam used as heatset medium can get much more completely and evenly to each part of the yarn – be it inside or outside. The yarn, still having said form, then leaves the process chamber and passes a cold chamber where it is cooled down to the glass transition temperature as far as possible.
The 4 conveyor chains are complemented by 4 guide rails forming an octagonal polygon together. The polygon’s diameter can be
changed by a certain mechanism making it possible to limit the shrinking of the yarn which indirectly influences the bulk development (the volume of the yarn). This is not possible with a conveyor system.
As soon as the yarn has been cooled down, it is wound off the conveyor chain in a controlled way by means of an unwindingmechanism using a special device and taken out of the process chamber by the winding machine.
A newly developed device is positioned between the compact heatset machine and the winding machine which measures the yarn tension between the two components, compares it with a given tension value and then maintains it by means of a triggered eddy current brake.
The package build-up at the winding machine becomes better and more uniform in this system. In this connection it should be mentioned that in the compact heatsetting system the winding machine is not dependent on the feeding behaviour of the heatset system, but vice versa. The winding machine always runs at a constant given take-off speed and the heatset process notes even small differences in speed and balances them as soon as the yarn is fed. The constant winding speed also leads to an improvement of the package build-up.
The system is designed very dynamically that, in case of a yarn break, the complete flow process is stopped before the broken yarn end enters the Compact Heatset system. Downtime is reduced considerably, since the broken end only has to be spliced again and not all ends have to be fed in again.
Everbody was surprised to see this development and the Power-Heat-Set booth received many inquires about this new technique.
Power-Heat-Set technicians were available to explain and to demonstrate the operation of the compact heat set and vistors could view
carpet samples made with compact heatset yarn as well. Everybody was very impressed and admired the quality of the carpets. Not only,
did many visitors come back to show the compact heatset machine to their colleagues and friends, but a lot of visitors wanted to place
immediate purchase orders.
This big success was only made possible through highly motivated employees, who worked long hours to get the compact heatset machine ready in time for the presentation at the ITMA.
A special “THANK YOU” to all of them.
See some impressions of the exhibition:
