Increasing Energy Potentials of Air-Jet Weaving Machines by Using Energy Efficiency as a Central Requirement in the Design Phase of the Weft Insertion Process

The use of a novel method to exploit energy savings potentials in production processes of textile industry has been applied to the air-jet weaving technology. Energy efficiency is taken as central property in the design process and it represents a new requirement/property to be defined in the phase of design problem/task definition. In contradiction with established methodologies, the approach includes an initial analysis of existing technical systems and the individuation and classification of their prior and relevant energy consumers (sub-systems and processes). The identified major consumers and processes are afterwards systematically addressed to reduce their energy consumption: interaction of the relay nozzle flow field with the profiled reed. A following analysis step consists in the verification of the system design, predicting and evaluating the system behavior using several tools (e.g. finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics simulations, experimental analyses, etc.). Since nowadays products become more and more multi-disciplinary by the constantly increasing integration of added functionality and product intelligence and since energy is a global design attribute which is influenced by all disciplines, the development of energy analysis methodologies, both numerical and experimental, able to decrease the environmental impact and to keep constant the machine performance requires an integrated research strategy. Therefore in next air jet weaving machine generations, the design process should move from a purely performance and capacity driven approach to an approach that includes energy efficiency as a key parameter.