Please choose your delivery country and your customer group
The textile markets are steadily growing, due to the increasing world population, magnified by the demand for human comfort and safety. Textile production has seen dramatic improvements in technology during the past few years. The number of suppliers of production equipment - machinery, instrumentation, and spare parts - is reduced now to a few global players. The latter effect is easy to explain: productivity of textile machinery has seen an almost steady growth of around 4 % per year since 1850. This is unique in the history of technology, and probably due to unrestricted technical development. Moreover, the fierce competition among the leading suppliers of machinery makes continuous technical development essential to stay in business. Development of textile technology starts with the fiber material. Today, we take fibers like Polyester of Polypropylene for granted, while these are quite recent developments in the history of textiles. They have gained 2-digit percentages of market share within few years, despite original drawbacks in dyeing and finishing processes that seemed to make these fibers hardly, if ever, useful. Narrow fabric production machines count among the first to apply computer control for textile production. They are perfect examples of modern design principles by integrating digital servo drive technology, sensors, and control functions, into a single, consistent package as a manufacturing system. Future developments will probably integrate even more functions, as automatic repair of ends down and complete remote control by Internet protocol. Increasing productivity is not only achieved by higher speed, but also by more operating hours and a reduction of down time.