Developing an electronically controlled slub attachment for ring spinning frame and investigating on the slub yarn properties

Recently, the competition in textile sector has been growing all over the world. Turkish textile sector needs to produce the high value products, the fashionable products and the convenient products for branding in order to keep and increase its own market share in the world. In this context, fancy yarns come into question. Slub yarn is one of the most widespread fancy yarns. Especially, the fancy yarns produced on ring spinning frame give a wide range of effects to fabric and provide flexibility for the producers to gain competitive advantages.Nowadays, the main principle of producing slub yarn on ring spinning frame is to change main draft in producing a flat yarn for different periods. In this study, an original electronically controlled slub attachment has been designed and mounted on a conventional ring spinning machine. First, some mechanical changes were made on the ring spinning machine for mounting. Then, servo motors were connected to middle and rear draft cylinders. The electrical and electronic hardware which basically consist of PLC devices, drivers and encoders were setup and a PC was connected to. A PC software was prepared in order to enter data into the system and design a slub yarn. And then, a PLC software was also prepared in order to process data and produce the signals for controlling the motors. Then, the slub yarn samples were produced in accordance with an experiment design using the slub attachment mounted on the ring spinning frame. And finally, the quality and control tests were applied to all samples and the output data were analyzed by using the SPSS 15.0 and Design Expert 6.01 statistical software packages.Key Words: Slub yarn, Slub attachment, Ring spinning frame, Automation