Jiggers and dancers: load cell in textile manufacturing
It’s hardly surprising that an ancient manufacturing process such as creating textiles has its fair share of descriptive names for parts of the process. However, load cells are set to rename some of these as they redefine the way textiles are made and finished.
According to an article at AZO Materials, the use of load cells to upgrade web tension machinery has increased efficiency and reduced tuning time by up to 50% at a major Italian fabric finishing facility.
Open and closed jiggers
Fabric pre-treating and dying of woven fabric involve jiggers, dying machines where the fabric is held on two rollers at full width. The fabric passes back and forth between the rollers via a dye bath. Jiggers come in two formats:
- “Open” jiggers operating at atmospheric temperature and pressure
- “Closed” jiggers operating under pressure at high temperatures
Maintaining the tension of the cloth in the jigger is crucial to maintaining quality, productivity and avoiding breaks in the fabric web due to tension fluctuations.
Previously, tension was maintained by the use of dancer rolls, where the tension of the web was measured by the dancer roll’s physical position. The use of web tension load cells instead provides real-time, constant monitoring to ensure web tension precision and consistency. At the Italian facility, introduction of these load cells increased productivity and also improved safety too.
Web tension and load cells
Maintaining web tension is crucial across a wide range of uses, as we explored in a previous article:
“Many manufacturing processes rely on a similar technique of unrolling material at one end, passing it through various processes, and then rolling it up again. The material is usually known as a web. The web is simply a term for any material that is continuously pulled from a roll through a manufacturing process of some sort.”
Load cells and shearing carpets
It’s not just in the fabric dying process where web tension is important in finishing textiles. Carpet shearing is the process where the top layer of “fluff” is removed, and as we discussed in a previous article:
“Key to the process of maintaining an even cut is a load cell tension control drive system.”
Hot off the press
Most of us will have seen the images of a continuous stream of newspapers being printed and “rolling off the presses”. Our blog on printing presses explains further how maintaining web tension can resolve common issues such as
– “Out of registration printing (misalignment)
– Web breaks
– Stretching
– Coating inconsistencies”
Load cells for your projects
You may not be heading into space yourself in 2025, but whatever project you’ve planned, our load cells can help test and monitor performance. Contact us to discuss your requirements, or buy direct from our online store for quick distribution from our base in Reading, UK.
