Design and Development of Beat up Mechanism of High Speed Shuttle Loom

Abstract

Various kind of high speed looms have been developed in last two decades and mostly all developments have been done in the field of shuttle less looms. In India, we have higher demand of clothes without selvage, and for these types of clothes, shuttle loom is necessary, which produce clothes at lower cost. The only drawback of shuttle loom is its low speed, current shuttle looms are running at 120 ppm(pick per minute), and due to this its productivity is less. Therefore, design and development of high speed shuttle loom is essential which runs at 30 to 40 percentage higher speed than the current looms.

There are five basic mechanisms in shuttle loom, shedding, picking, Beat-up, Let-off and take-off. Beat-up operation is the third primary weaving motion, it is also known as a sley mechanism. The main function of the beat-up mechanism is the reciprocating motion of the reed. The reed is used to push every weft thread to the fabric fell. And this whole process is known as a Beat-up operation. Beat-up mechanism is very much similar with the crank-rocker mechanism. But here one wooden sley with reed is attached on the top of the rocker, which is used to push that weft into to the warp. The present work is related to kinematic and dynamic analysis of Beat-up mechanism to achieve high speed in shuttle loom.

Here the kinematic analysis has been carried out for the Beat-up mechanism (also known as sley mechanism) of high speed shuttle loom. For high speed loom operation, the sley should remain backward for longer period for weft insertion, and then move quickly for beat-up. Based on the above consideration weft insertion period has been obtained for the beat-up mechanism from the position analysis carried out for the sley. Different combination of crank-rocker dimension has been tried and the link dimensions are arrived at keeping transmission angle maximum.

The proposed mechanism then analyzed for dynamic loading conditions. The mass and inertia of the majority of the links are taken almost same as existing mechanism. The join forces and forces acting on the members are to be found. The Finite Element Analysis of every member is carried out and each member is found safe.

The existing machine uses wooden-sley which is weighing 80 kg, is replaced by aluminum channel weighing 14 kg and its effect on the performance and strength is analyzed. This paper deals with a method for the rapid and easy study of the effect of various parameters on the dynamic characteristics of designed mechanism. The mutual relations of each parameter can be derived, the mass related parameters of mechanism, total beat-up force is required to push that weft, total driving torque is required to design high speed Beat-up mechanism.