Power Loom

Overview

A power loom weaves cloth by interlacing warp and weft yarns at high speed under program control. This is an air-jet loom: instead of a shuttle, a jet of compressed air shoots the weft thread across the warp shed, allowing very high pick rates with no heavy reciprocating carrier. A heavy frame carries the warp let-off, the shedding motion that opens the warp, the air-jet insertion, and the reed that beats each pick into the cloth, all sequenced by a controller from the warp beam through to the cloth roll.

Warp yarn is delivered by the Warp Let-Off, which meters thousands of ends off the warp beam under closed-loop tension control, sensed by a load cell on the back rest roller.

How it works

Each weaving cycle begins with shedding. The Shedding Motion motion is an electronic dobby that lifts selected heald frames in programmed order, splitting the warp into an upper and lower sheet to open a shed. The Air-Jet Weft Insertion system then fires a pick across: a main nozzle launches the weft and a row of relay nozzles along the reed relay the air stream to carry it the full width. The Weft Feed accumulators meter exactly one pick length, and an optical sensor confirms the weft arrived before the next cycle.

With the pick laid in, the Reed & Sley sley swings the reed forward to beat the new weft up against the cloth fell, and the next shed opens with the frames reversed to lock the yarn in. The Cloth Take-Up advances the finished cloth at the set pick density over an emery roller onto the cloth roll, while leno and tuck-in devices form a firm selvedge at each edge.

Two protective systems guard quality. The Warp Stop Motion motion drops a wire onto an electric bar the instant a warp end breaks, halting the loom. All of it is timed by the Loom Control System system, which reads a main-shaft encoder and sequences insertion, shedding and beat-up to a fraction of a degree.