Card clothing with spatially morphological teeth and their application verification on carding machine

Abstract

In this study, we prepared two kinds of card clothing for the licker-in and the main cylinder with spatially morphological features on their teeth. They are designed to reduce the fibre damage and improve the fibre carding efficiency by setting their teeth with a preset-inclination angle (W-R) or a misaligned arrangement (M-CC). We conducted experiments to explore their respective functions and found that they have potential applications when combined. We also performed experiments to verify this hypothesis. To evaluate the carding performance, we proposed a carding evaluation system that includes the energy consumption, fibre utilization and the quality of slivers and yarns. According to the individual experiments on W-R and M-CC, they both showed good performance on sliver neps and short fibre removal, and yarn properties. And their improvements on yarns show well complementarity. When compared with the control group (the traditional card clothing combination, labelled as W0M0), their combination (W1M1) performed better at relatively higher output speeds. It helped to reduce nep number, short fibre content (6–10%) in slivers, with significantly higher carding forces (reflected by energy consumption) and higher fibre utilization ratios (1.02–1.60%). In yarn quality, the W1M1 had improvements on evenness (0.47–0.55%), yarn faults (including thin and thick places of ±50% and +200% neps), hairiness values (0.19–5.73%), strength (5.91–7.82%), which verify the compounding effect of these two kinds of card clothing.