Taiwan ‘Smart’ Machinery Leads Textile Industry
Seven Taiwanese textile machinery companies with TAITRA (Taiwan External Trade Development Council), have showcased their intelligent/smart textile machinery and innovative solutions at ITMA 2019.
The export value of Taiwanese textile machinery from 2018 was 1.02 billon US dollars, which was up nearly 1% when compared to 2017. Leading global brands such as Nike, Adidas, Uniqlo, use Taiwanese functional fabric, that now represents 70% of the world’s functional fabrics market.
Companies such as Pai Lung, Logic Art, AK Dyeing, ACME, CCI Tech, Tai Ho Shing and Taiwan Giu Chun have presented their state-of-the-art innovations and technological advances related to smart machinery solutions for the world textile industry.
As Jenny Tsai, Director of TAITRA Barcelona office, says: “In Taiwan’s textile industry, the upper, middle and downstream of the industry chain is working hard to transform itself, actively pursuing a refined and differentiated layout, and gradually paving new roads. Industry 4.0 flipped the manufacturing industry, allowing small enterprises to rely on smart machines’ software and hardware integration to build their brand features”.
Here is some of the Taiwanese innovations that were presented at ITMA 2019.
Pai Lung
Based on industry 4.0, Pai Lung presented the MES solution to achieve cost-reduction and become smart factory. With POMS, which is a command center that can give orders to all machines to achieve production target, and KFMS (Knitting Fabric Management System), a complete database to help customer to realize Datamation, Pai Lung provides perfect repetition on fabrics with error rate less than 1%. Brian Lan, Pai Lung Assistant Vice President, explains that “MES is a system designed to assist corporations to collect and monitor production data during the manufacturing process from order placing, production inception, and process control to product output”.
Logic Art
Logic Art presented at ITMA 2019 the LA-210 machine, an innovation for dye house intelligent integration, allowing automated production centered in product development, brand creation and facilities improvement. Steven Shen, Logic Art managing director, says: “LA-210, the automatic dyestuff weighing system is a fast and convenient method of dyestuff refill that can eliminate human weighing errors, providing a total solution essential for the modern dye house”.
AK Dyeing
AK Dyeing presented AK-DSL 2018 machine, which has washing-smart wash system and hybrid technology to reduce 30%-40% wastewater discharge. Sensor (steam, water, electric consumption, machine run speed, chemical injection rate, Fabric run speed) are all embedded in the machine to provide digital operation data. All the operational data collected through the sensors can be stored in the Industrial PC provided and connect to the Dyehouse’s Central Management System. Steven Lin, AK Dyeing general manager adds “The machine retains the ability for wide rage application of synthetic fabric. It is able to satisfy the stringent quality requirement of Branded company need for light weight, high quality, highly functional fabric.”
ACME
During the press conference, ACME exhibited AM-ICD, a smart machine that reduces the necessary evil of the conventional dyeing machine with 65% water reduced, 65% pollution reduced, and 65% chemical, energy and power saved. “Reducing the liquor ratio of dyeing machines has become the highest target for manufactures, because the textile dyeing industry is not only one of the biggest consumers of water and energy but also the biggest producer of pollution”, said Ya-Chen Chang, Marketing Manager.
CCI Tech
CCI Tech is the only one that is fully committed to sampling solutions for varied weaving application. CCI’s automated sampling solution only requires as minimum as 1 bobbin to complete the whole process from sizing, warping to weaving. And the lead time for making a sample fabric, can be easily shorten from few weeks to just a few hours. “We believe that through our complete automated sampling solutions, customers can create more new business opportunities and a faster market response to different sorts of sample development, and enhance their competitiveness in the market.”, said Andy Yueh, CCI Tech Sales Manager.
Tai Ho Shing (THS)
Tai Ho Shing (THS) exhibited Rosso Method, an automatic linker machine that essentially joins the two open ends of the open sock together. This method reduces the traditional three steps hand linking into only one step. In addition, reduces 30-50% of the total production time and it has high productivity in socks manufacturing because it can produce wide variety of socks with the same machine. Fernanda Lin, THS marketing manager explains that “We provide real time information collection on every machine that feeds back to the plant central PC or company network. Data includes daily or shift machine productivity collection, stop times, alarms, error messages, yarn breakage”.
Taiwan Giu Chun (T.C.H)
Taiwan Giu Chun (T.C.H) presented two exhibition machines to develop crochet knitting: double bed warp knitting and cord knitting. The first one produces lateral contraction garment flexible tapes, with high production, saving space and less maintenance. Instead, the cord knitting machine produces shoelace, ropes, glassed string and decorative cords with flat, round, triangle or quadrilateral shape. Vincent Tsai, T.C.H managing director said that: “The technology that T.C.H provides saves space and improves production. We are specialized in crochet develop, and we know that the style, time production and quality products are really important for our sector”.
