Vegetable Matter Clearing 9

Main Contents

9 Vegetable Matter Clearing ..................................................................... 9.1

9.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 9.1

9.1.1 Vegetable matter ........................................................................................................................... 9.2
9.1.2 Distribution of vegetables and foreign fibers ................................................................................. 9.3

9.2 Dense area for vegetable matter (VEG) ..................................................................................... 9.3

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9.3 Classification matrix of vegetable matters with the USTER QUANTUM 3 ........................... 9.6
9.4 Clearing limits .............................................................................................................................. 9.6
9.4.1 Setting a clearing limit for vegetable matter (VEG) ....................................................................... 9.7

9.5 Vegetable matters and their effect on the fabric appearance ................................................. 9.9
9.5.1 Field test ........................................................................................................................................ 9.9
9.5.2 Reasons and measures to minimize vegetable matter in yarns .................................................. 9.11

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9 Vegetable Matter Clearing

9.1 Introduction

Uster Technologies has now many years of foreign fiber experience with USTER® QUANTUM. This
experience helped us to recognize opportunities to improve the features of the USTER® QUANTUM
3.

Some of the customers are also interested to eliminate vegetables, but many customers are eager to
only remove real foreign fibers because they can prove that the vegetables are not visible anymore
after bleaching.

The elimination of inorganic foreign fibers only and keeping as much vegetables in the yarn as possi-
ble can be applied for the following purposes:
• Reduction of cuts while keeping the eliminated number of disturbing foreign fibers constant
• Keeping the number of cuts constant but eliminating more and finer foreign fibers with the same
machine efficiency.

Uster Technologies has developed a tool for the USTER® QUANTUM 3 to separate foreign fibers and
vegetables. This feature is named Vegetable Clearing. The new foreign matter (FM) sensor of the
USTER® QUANTUM 3 has multicolored light sources and can detect various colored foreign fibers
and also enables the classification of vegetables separately. The USTER® QUANTUM 3 smartly splits
the foreign matter into two populations, disturbing colored inorganic foreign fibers and non disturbing
vegetable foreign matter. Separate limits for foreign fibers and vegetable matter can be defined.

Fig. 9-1 Various vegetable matters in yarns at different magnification. The distance between the black lines
is 10 mm

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9.1.1 Vegetable matter

With vegetable matter, it is necessary to clearly differentiate between two categories

• pieces of vegetables
• vegetable packing material

Pieces of vegetables
Under this term, it is commonly understood:
• leaf fragments • bark fragments
• stem fragments • seed-coat fragments

The color is light to dark brown and the shape is irregular. The foreign matter adheres to or, in some
cases, is embedded in the yarn.

The frequency of such foreign matter depends on the degree of contamination of the fiber material
and on the efficiency of the blow-room equipment. In general, it can be said that the relative percent-
age of such foreign matter is usually high.

Foreign matter in the form of vegetables is normally brightened up almost completely in the bleaching
process. But the effectiveness of the bleaching process depends on the recipe and on the applied
technology. Under normal conditions, this type of foreign matter is considered as non-disturbing.

Experience has shown that vegetables deriving from some weeds might remain as dark spots in the
yarn after bleaching. The monitoring of such faults is aspired.

Fig. 9-2 Examples for seed-coat fragments (left) and short vegetables (right) in yarns

Vegetable packing material

Foreign matter made out of vegetable packing materials is e.g.:
• jute fabric or jute or hemp strings
• chemical components based on cellulosic material

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The structure of the material is clearly fibrous. The color is usually light to dark-brown and the length
is in a short to medium range of approx. 1 to 2 cm. The fibers are extremely rigid and brittle, so that
they often protrude from the yarn and rarely cling tightly to the yarn body (Fig. 9-3).

Due to the chemical similarity to the vegetable components of the fiber material, e.g. cotton, vegetable
packing materials are also affected by the bleaching process, whereby the recipe and the process
technology again play an important role. Usually, this type of foreign matter can only be partly bright-
ened through bleaching.

Fig. 9-3 Examples for long vegetables in yarns

9.1.2 Distribution of vegetables and foreign fibers

In order to differentiate between vegetables and foreign fibers, different possibilities were tested. The
chosen approach was:
• A fine foreign fiber has a low reflection and a low mass
• A coarse foreign fiber or a bundle of foreign fibers has a high reflection and a considerable mass

The vegetable matter clearing was developed only for the capacitive clearer.

9.2 Dense area for vegetable matter (VEG)

The “Dense Area”, an innovative and unique feature of the USTER® QUANTUM 3 has already been
explained for foreign matter in Chapter 8. The USTER® QUANTUM 3 has a similar dense area for
vegetable matter clearing. The dense area for vegetable matter is also the display of the range where
vegetable matters are occurring very frequently. The brown colored dense area is used to visualize
the distribution and frequency of clearing limits for the vegetable matter.

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The dense area depends on the raw material. If a yarn produced from cotton having a lot of foreign
matter and vegetables, then the dense area will be wider, and a high number of cuts have to be ex-
pected.

Similar to the yarn body, after running only a few kilometers of yarn, the first impression of the dense
area and the significant foreign fibers will appear.

Fig. 9-4 shows a dense area for inorganic foreign matter with vegetable clearing and Fig. 9-5 shows a
dense area for vegetable matter with larger vegetables shown as single dots as seen by the USTER®
QUANTUM 3, with all the frequent events recorded in the yarn (brown dots), and with the dense area
of insignificant events (brown area).

The vertical scale represents the visual appearance or intensity and the horizontal axis represents the
vegetable faults length in cm.

Fig. 9-4 Display of the dense area and the scatter Fig. 9-5 Display of the dense area and the scat-
plot for foreign matter ter plot for vegetable matter

As shown in Fig. 9-6, two separate limits for foreign fibers and vegetable matter are shown on the
vegetable clearing page. The brown dots between the FD and vegetable clearing curves represent in
cuts savings.

Fig. 9-6 Separate limits for foreign fibers and organic matter

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Fig. 9-7 shows how the foreign matter can be separated into inorganic foreign fibers and vegetable
matter.

Scatter plot containing

foreign fibers and vegeta-
ble matter (FD Clearing)

Scatter plot containing foreign Scatter plot containing only

fibers and some vegetable mat- vegetable matter (VEG Clearing)
ter which are not conclusively
identified as vegetables

Matrix of foreign matter showing clearing curve for foreign Matrix of vegetable matter showing both clearing curves
fibers (VEG Clearing) for foreign fibers and vegetable matter (VEG Clearing)

Fig. 9-7 Separation of inorganic and vegetable matter

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9.3 Classification matrix of vegetable matters with the USTER® QUANTUM 3

Uster Technologies has developed a classification matrix for foreign fibers and vegetable matters. Fig.
9-8 shows the structure of the classification matrix for foreign fibers, which represents the appearance
(in %) and length (in cm).

Fig. 9-8 Classifying system for vegetables (Standard vegetable classes (left) and extended vegetable clas-
ses (right))

9.4 Clearing limits

As a result of intensive field tests, the vegetable clearing was defined. Vegetables are part of foreign
matter. However with most common bleaching processes, vegetables become invisible after bleach-
ing. Therefore mostly it is not necessary to remove them. Since the proportion of vegetables is rather
high in cottons of some growth areas this results in a substantial drop in production if all the larger
vegetables have to be removed and at the same time limits the ability to remove inorganic disturbing
fibers.

The USTER® QUANTUM 3 separates vegetables from other foreign matter. This offers better selec-
tivity in foreign matter clearing and save cuts significantly. The reduction of cuts is reached by allow-
ing vegetables which will not disturb the downstream process to pass (they will not be cut). The fea-
ture is used for articles that will undergo a bleaching process.

In most situations vegetables are not disturbing. However long and thick vegetables have to be re-
moved since they can cause breaks in downstream processes. The Vegetable Clearing is a very use-
ful tool to distinguish between organic and inorganic fibers. Since vegetables are not visible after the
bleaching process, they can often remain in the yarn. The result is a reduction of foreign fiber cuts.
There might be a need to cut long or intense vegetables to avoid warping or knitting breaks in subse-
quent processes.

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Fig. 9-9 Cut savings with vegetable clearing. The colored area between the two clearing curves shows the
cut savings when applying Vegetable Clearing (right).

In applications where the bleaching agents are milder, vegetables do not completely disappear for the
human eye after bleaching and need to be treated like colored foreign fibers. Therefore they have to
be removed according to the quality needs.

9.4.1 Setting a clearing limit for vegetable matter (VEG)

The built-in intelligence of USTER® QUANTUM 3 divides the vegetables into more or less disturbing
events according to the end product requirements. This is expressed by the way of choosing close,
medium and open setting.

The USTER® QUANTUM 3 has a vegetable Clearing feature displaying a dense area and four differ-
ent setting possibilities. These are named FD switched off, close, medium and open. The USTER®
QUANTUM 3 also provides vegetable classification. Three clearing limit possibilities (close, medium,
open) are always synchronized to the FD clearing limit. The difference between the FD and vegetable
clearing results in cut savings.
• As FD: The vegetable clearing is switched off. (All the vegetables are classified as foreign matter
and they are removed by using FD clearing limit.)
• Close: Only small vegetables remain in the yarn. Of course this will only result in a small saving
of FD cuts.
• Medium: Small to medium vegetables remains in the yarn. This will reduce the number of FD cuts
to a large extend.
• Open: Most of the vegetables remain in the yarn and the highest savings of cuts will be reached.

The Vegetable Clearing is only available when using the capacitive clearer.
The USTER® QUANTUM 3 provides Vegetable Clearing with a dense area and three setting possibili-
ties.

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Fig. 9-10 Fig. 9-11 Fig. 9-12 Fig. 9-13

FD setting only Vegetable settings Vegetable settings Vegetable settings
“close” “medium” “open”

Fig. 9-14 Fig. 9-15 Fig. 9-16

Vegetable settings “close” Vegetable settings “medium” Vegetable settings “open”

For each group or winding position the VEG events are displayed as individual dots on the classifica-
tion matrix.

VEG clearing limit

Brown dots are remaining

vegetables.

Dense area

Fig. 9-17 Display of the dense area and Vegetable Clearing curve. In the top right corner of the matrix the FD
cuts saved are displayed.

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Recommendations:
Generally, we are recommending using “medium” level, if the used raw material (cotton) contains
vegetables. If the user is sure that the used raw material does not contain any vegetables, then the
vegetable clearing feature should not be used. For other raw material types like synthetics or worsted
yarns the use of this function is not recommended.

Besides the clearing limit function, of course the foreign fiber (FD) and vegetable matter clearing
(VEG) classification is a very powerful tool to minimize the number of cuts.

Fig. 9-18 Display of the limits for Vegetable Clearing. This Vegetable Clearing allows the saving of 15,2 cuts
per 100 km.

9.5 Vegetable matters and their effect on the fabric appearance

9.5.1 Field test

In this field test, an investigation about the contamination and its impact on yarns has been done. In
order to realize the effect of the contamination on the final product, the after treatment processes of
the yarn were simulated.

For this field test, 100% medium staple Greek cotton was used. The contamination from the blow-
room over a lot of seasons was collected and classified into categories according to their frequency
and appearance characteristics. Then the contaminated samples together with cotton yarn were pre-
bleached and bleached.

The material after the treatment was analyzed under a microscope and pictures were taken.

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The results of the survey had shown that more than 70% of the foreign material that had been found
in the blow-room was decolorized with pre-bleaching including feathers, cotton plant residuals, col-
ored cotton due to infection. The plastics or wool was not affected by bleaching. The vegetable resid-
uals were not fully always decolorized but some of them remain of a yellowish shade after pre-
bleaching. The majority of the colored contaminants were from the strings which have been used for
cotton transportation and ginning and from fabrics (cloths).The non-affected material was inorganic
material (Fig. 9-19 and Fig. 9-20).

Fig. 9-19 Effect of bleaching on foreign fibers. The foreign fibers hardly change the color.

Fig. 9-20 Effect of pre-bleaching on vegetable matter. Already after pre-bleaching most the vegetable fibers
do not differ in color from normal cotton.

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9.5.2 Reasons and measures to minimize vegetable matter in yarns

In Table 9-1 and Table 9-2, the origin of the faults related to yarn contaminations is given. Possible
reasons and preventive measures to avoid such faults are explained and various USTER® tools for
improvement are presented.

VEGETABLE MATTER CONTAMINATION

Origin of Faults Possible Reasons and Preventive Actions

Bale management Prefer – when possible – to use cotton with low content of foreign fibers
and vegetable matter.
Controlled recycling of waste
Blowroom Optimize and control the settings and maintenance of the blowroom ma-
chines
Cards Efficient carding and combing

Drawing frame Proper blending at all drawframes

Optimize comber settings (comber noil, processing speed) in order to

Combing
achieve the maximum foreign fiber reduction.

Table 9-1

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CONTAMINATION / USTER Tools for Improvement

Tools Improvement
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USTER Testing off-line Quality control of foreign fibers and vegetable matter with USTER
TESTER when dealing with new raw material
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USTER QUANTUM CLEARER Proper setting of foreign fiber and vegetable matter detection
Separate outlier bobbins with too many foreign fibers with quality alarm
settings
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USTER EXPERT SYSTEMS Long-term control of quality level

Table 9-2 Preventive measures and tools for the management of foreign fibers and vegetable matter

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