My work

I am working at the Department of  Textiles at UMIST in the United Kingdom to get a Ph.D. degree in Textile Engineering. My ongoing research is a method of process improvement for the knitting industry specifically for the circular knitting machine.

Introduction of  the research

Nowadays, many items like T-shirt, sweater, hosiery and so forth in the fabric section  and many moulding base structure for high performance textile are being made by  knitting.  This knitted fabric are maintaining about half percentage in apparel fabrics in the textile industry since the early 1960s. What's more, the quantity and diversity in knit fabrics available is unexpected so it is being occupied an important role in textile area.

In a history of knitting machine development, many parts of the machine have being improved since the basic frames for modern knitting machines was developed in the mid-1950s. Particularly, the knitting products are having a lot of portion in fabric industry since controls and computerization of knitting machines turned out during the 1970s and early 1980s.  What's more, as installing wide diameter knitting machine capable of producing tubular, the end uses of knitted fabric were found in many products once treated to be the exclusive area of weaving.

In making knitted fabric with the knitting machines, there are two kinds of method for it, warp and weft knitting, produced different style of knitting machine, a flat-bed knitting machine and a circular knitting machine. One of them, a circular knitting machine for producing weft knitted fabrics is the important one characterized by either one or two complete set of needles arranged around the circumference of the machine. The fabric from the machine is made by yarns forming loops across the width or around the circumference of the fabric.

 The fabric being made with cotton and the blended with it are keeping a large share of the knitting products by circular knitting machine. Furthermore, a significant quantity of cotton and cotton blended yarn is converted into the weft knit fabric for use in the underwear, sportswear, and industrial applications.

However, here is a faulty by-product of cotton, called fly(fluff, lint) on circular knitting machine. This fly has long been notorious as a source of several serious problems, including many fabric faults and mechanical defects rarely such as broken needles. Furthermore, it seems to be generally accepted that there is no health hazard in the dust from processed natural textile staple fibre, however it may be unpleasant to work in an atmosphere overburdened with fly. Specially, dry cotton is so brittle that more prone to the creation of fly.

There have been many possible solutions to tackle the problem such as a ventilation, suction, blowing and air conditioning. However, they all have other perspective problems behind of it.

The object of this study is to review the above mentioned problem via all sorts of sources and to monitor whether an another possible solution, yarn coating, has a beneficial effect on the problem by modelling a coated yarn structure and using a developed testing rig interfaced to a computer.