DESIGN, CONSTRUCTION AND EVALUATION OF AN ON CARRIER YARN TENSION CONTROLLED YARN CARRIER TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF FLATBED KNITTED FABRICS

Abstract

Flatbed knitting has become an industry standard application due to its full-garment-panel and 3D whole garment technology in the knitted garment industry. This kind of technology can help to eliminate the seam on the garment and reduce the waste on fabric, however, the uncertain tension variation on the flatbed knitting machine will limit the benefits of the technology as mentioned before and even cause a bad influence to the quality of knitted products. The tension variation will not only impact the size of the garment panels but will also waste the yarns. This MPhil research was successful in designing and developing a novel on-carrier yarn tension controlling system for flatbed knitting machines through mounting a yarn tension controlling device on the yarn feeder. The tension controlling system can do a synchronous movement with yarn feeder which is a novel technology compared to the conventional negative feeding and assistive feeding system on the flatbed knitting machines. The novel tension controlling system is tested in two ways which respectively are; dynamic tension signal waveform and average stitch length. The test proved that this novel tension controlling system can reduce the tension variation and control the stitch size in an appropriate range with some specific experimental parameter set.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Jayawan Wijekoon (Supervisor) & Anura Fernando (Supervisor)