Paving the way toward the smart spinning mill

Yarn production has been continuously automated over the past decades. Even so, there still is potential for innovation throughout the entire spinning process. In recent years, there has been an increase in interest in automation in the spinning industry. The main drivers are the economic challenges due to rising personnel costs and reduced availability of employees. Rieter is committed to taking automation to the next level, focusing on digital solutions and a network of innovation partners.

The history of the spinning industry is one of progressive automation: Since the first mechanical spinning mills were established in the second half of the 18th century, the machines and processes used to make yarn from staple fibers have been continuously developed to increase the efficiency and production quality of each machine.

In modern spinning mills, most process steps have been automated since the 1990s. This applies not only to the spinning process itself, but also to the upstream and downstream operations. A prime example is fiber preparation: A bale opener automatically opens bales of cotton or man-made fibers and feeds the fiber tufts into an air stream. The fibers then pass through various cleaning and mixing stages before finally leaving the fiber preparation step as card sliver. In this process, operators are primarily responsible for setting up, monitoring and maintaining the machines – production is completely autonomous.

Potential in automated material transport

And yet, even in the most advanced spinning mills, there still exist steps that must be performed manually. This often applies to material handling, such as the transport of cans, and is particularly relevant when material is fed into the machine, such as piecing-in a ring spinning machine.

After the turn of the millennium, digitization opened new possibilities for optimizing the spinning mill as a complete system. Rieter was quick to recognize the tremendous potential and has consistently expanded its digital portfolio over the years. Today, this is available on the market under the brand ESSENTIAL – Rieter Digital Spinning Suite.

While demand for advanced automation solutions was low for a long time, interest has surged worldwide in recent years. This is evidenced by the numerous orders for the piecing robot ROBOspin, which Rieter launched in 2019.

Demand for automation solutions on the rise

The renewed interest in next generation automation solutions can be attributed to three main factors:

1. Personnel situation

Spinning mills around the world are having trouble finding skilled personnel, and there is also high fluctuation in this area. Automation opens opportunities here, allowing monotonous tasks to be performed by machines, while employees can take on more enriching and demanding tasks.

2. Yarn quality

While human intervention in the production process can lead to variations in quality, automated processes guarantee consistent yarn quality. The decisive factor here is that automated systems can track process and quality parameters in real time – a key success factor for spinning mills.

3. Efficiency

Automated processes increase production output and resource efficiency, e.g. through better material utilization or lower energy consumption, thus improving the economic efficiency of the spinning mill.

Given the competitive environment in which spinning mills operate today, the demand for automation solutions is expected to continue to grow in the coming years. Rieter anticipated this development and successfully positioned itself as a driver of innovation and leading supplier of automation solutions.

No innovation without digitization

Rieter is guided here by a clear strategic vision: the smart spinning mill with a fully automated production process – from the delivery of fibers to the palletizing of packages.

End-to-end digitization is a prerequisite for achieving this vision. All Rieter machines already collect comprehensive data on material quality and machine status. This data serves as a basis for optimal production quality and efficiency, while also enabling preventive machine maintenance, which, among other things, results in a massive reduction in downtime.

ROBOspin, the spinning robot for ring and compact-spinning machines, for example, demonstrates the promise of success that lies in the consistent combination of digitization and automation: In combination with the Individual Spindle Monitoring (ISM) system, also developed by Rieter, the solution considerably reduces the average time required for yarn piecing. The spinning mill benefits from increased production output and requires up to 50 percent fewer operators at the machines.

The right partners for comprehensive solutions

To further advance the automation of spinning mills, it is necessary to look beyond the machine. What is needed is an integrated approach that considers the spinning process from fiber to finished product and ensures that information is shared across processes. This is crucial, for example, when it comes to new solutions for transport systems and to material feeding into the machine: for material to flow automatically through the spinning mill, data must also flow from machine to machine.

ESSENTIAL digital spinning suite from Rieter is a software program that allows data to be recorded, processed and used across processes. This is the basis for automated machine control throughout the process, taking into account material quality or contamination levels, for example. At the same time, this data pool is a prerequisite for further automation.

In this way, digitization is opening new possibilities: in the smart spinning mill of the future, collaborative, autonomously moving robots could not only transport material from A to B, but also supply the machines with material while performing maintenance tasks in between. Such solutions promise massive efficiency gains for the operator and more demanding tasks for personnel: Instead of monotonous work in noisy production halls, the focus would be on new activities such as process monitoring and system optimization.

Approaches such as these not only provide a convincing answer to the current challenges facing Rieter’s customers. They also show that, after 230 years of development, the automation of spinning mills is not yet complete. Rieter intends to not only pursue this development to its conclusion, but also to implement it in the smart spinning mill. Thanks to its own expertise and a network of partner companies and research institutes that contribute know-how in specialized areas such as robotics, Rieter is ideally positioned to set new standards in spinning mill automation.