Zeitschrift für Textilwissenschaft und -technik

In the Present research work, a study has been planned to hold a critical investigation on improving production (Sewing) Efficiency of Lean Manufacturing based system. Sewing department was seen as the principal area in apparel production and this particular department is also called as money making area because in this area the garment product is formed into finished goods. When this fabric is entered to sewing process, it has to be rechecked by each department related to line arrangement, machine preparation, product component preparation such as pieces of fabric, threads, embroidery, and other accessories, and all at once the result of sewing line layout and daily production target made by the IE department based on data records taken and count based on time study. Afterward, the merchandise goes into the sewing course, regular control must be practiced especially in the origin of production because many problems come up at this time, usually with quality, machines setting, operators target and line balancing problem. These work might help apparel manufacturers understand how to overcome basic difficulties and how to improve the yield in the sewing section. From the survey, it was observed that how the lean manufacturing organization can be implemented and to increase the productivity of the stitching department. Before embarking on a production procedure of a style, need to have a meeting with all department IE; Merchandiser, production, QA, IE, PPIC, and mechanic to discuss the manner which will get into production, so they all can do the preparation that will reach the production moving smoothly, avoid mistake in production and increase the yield. The work was planned with the techniques like time study, motion work, downtime report study, performance work, skill matrix, training evaluation, hourly monitoring report and then on from the work, the reason for low output was celebrated and the method to increase the production is also graded.

Cotton acquires negative charge in aqueous medium and thus repels negatively charged dye anion during dyeing. Such repulsion between fibre and dye is offset by using large quantity of salt in dye bath, particularly for reactive dyes. A low dye bath exhaustion also leads to low dye fixation of reactive dyes on cotton. Thus, the use of high salt concentration and low reactive dye fixation lead to environmental problems related to highly coloured effluent with high salt content. Hence, modifying the cotton fibre to increase dye-fibre interaction is therefore the best route to overcome the lack of affinity for cotton to reactive dyes making salt-free reactive dyeing. However, majority of the chemicals used for imparting cationic sites in cotton are themselves not eco-friendly. This paper presents the possibility of salt-free reactive dyeing of cotton by modifying the surface of cotton fabric using soya bean hull. The cationization of cotton was carried out with natural amino acid extract obtained by acid hydrolysis from soya bean hull and cationized in the pad-dry-curing process to investigate its dyeability with reactive dye in both a conventional alkaline dye bath and salt-free acidic dye bath. FTIR spectroscopy confirmed that there was a change in chemical composition after cationization by pad-dry-cure technique. The color strength of modified cotton was better than that of conventional sample which is 3.9865 and 3.7135 respectively. The extent of improvement was 4% in dye exhaustion, 3.34% in dye fixation and 7.12% in the total dye utilization was achieved in this study. The wash, dry rubbing and perspiration fastness of the cationized cotton was found almost similar to that of the normal dyeing. There was a slight increase in flexural rigidity and crease recovery angle in the cationized cotton. The tensile strength of cationized and the conventional dyed cotton were found almost the same. The cationized cotton dyeing technique reduced the BOD, COD and TDS by around 32.4%, 27.3% and 75.4% respectively. It was revealed that soya bean hull was found to be effective for cationization in salt-free dyeing of cotton.

Automatic fabric defect detection plays an important role in textile industry. In this paper, a novel weave pattern detection method based on multiscale wavelet features and fuzzy clustering approach is proposed to tackle the problem in automatic weave pattern detection of woven fabric. Fuzzy C-means (FCM) clusters the multiscale features of the crossed areas of the fabric into two clusters. The state of the crossed area is determined by texture orientation features. The weave pattern is detected using the crossed area states. Since the proposed detection scheme requires few features, the amount of computational load involved is not significant. Moreover, an error correction algorithm has been added to correct the detection errors in some crossed areas. The performance of the proposed method is validated with plain and twill fabric images.

The apparel fabric manufacturing is a growing sector of the global textile industry and the fabrics used in this market are mainly produced by the conventional methods such as weaving and knitting processes. These methods of making apparel fabrics are length and costly. However, because of the advancements in nonwoven technology, nonwoven fabrics are finding a niche market in the clothing industry because of its cost effectiveness and high speeds of nonwoven production processes. We have carried out an extensive study on the development of apparellike nonwoven fabrics. The resultant fabric showed improved drape, hand, durability and thermophysiological comfort characteristics than the reference samples for apparel applications. Results of the study also showed that the developed nonwoven fabrics showed nearly 200% higher tensile strength than the reference nonwoven fabrics. Furthermore, it also showed improved air permeability, for example, the resultant nonwoven fabric exhibited 500% higher air permeability value as compared with the Evolon fabric at 100 Pa pressure. Thus the results of the study indicate that the resultant nonwoven fabrics may be used in a wide range of apparel applications, which can lead to additional benefits in terms of cost and time.