Cloth roll doffing machine for Indian powerloom industry

The operation of doffing a full cloth roller from a loom and loading an empty one in its place requires a lot of physical strain on the person working on the loom. Automation of this operation has been achieved by a few manufacturers either by incorporating an automatic fabric beam change system in the loom (e.g. Picanol B-8900 “Delta”) or with drive-by carts (e.g. Genkinger Hubtex). They require motor power as input and sophisticated electronic controls. Such mechanisms do have their place in a modern loom shed. However, a majority of the powerloom operators of India, who run 170000 looms amongst them, are not in a position to avail these “auto-doffing systems” because of various reasons, such as (i) there is very little space between looms in a typical powerloom operator’s factory. It is not possible to manoeuvre the drive-by carts within this space (ii) these systems are costly and (iii) the powerloom operators are not in a position to maintain them since the electronic components need a clean environment and temperature control to last long. In the absence of mechanised doffing systems, the cloth rollers are mostly dumped in the aisles. This makes them susceptible to soiling. The few designs available in patent literature do not address the specific requirements of Indian powerloom industry. Thus, there is a need for a cloth roller auto-doffing machine which does not require motor power as input, does not use electronic sensors or controls and can be operated by a single operator. In addition, a single machine should be capable of servicing many looms. This requires the machine to be mounted on wheels and narrow enough to pass between rows of looms. The design features of such a machine have been described in this paper.