Controlling Industrial Sewing Machine

The processing of textile products by sewing them together is a very complicated process. This may not be apparent at first glance, but a closer look at the process reveals that, due to the flexible, often extensible nature of the materials, their handling is a procedure that in almost all cases requires human hand. Another important aspect is setting the machines for the great variety of materials used currently. This can only be accomplished by experienced sewing technicians. Machine configuration and adjustment is an empirical, time-consuming process that is more and more significant considering that textile industry has been constantly moving away from massproduction to small orders with varying materials and styles. juki usha singer merritt sewing machine price list showroom in chennai

Machines should be able to set themselves up when the data regarding material properties and desired process parameters is known. During the process, it would be ideal if they could adapt themselves and detect defects or malfunction automatically. This would reduce set-up times, increase flexibility of the machines and increase product quality and process reliability, avoiding defects and rejected products. Research in this direction has been carried out by several investigators, such as Clapp [1], who studied the interface between the machine and the material feeding system, Stylios [2] who proposed the principles of intelligent sewing machines, amongst others. Within our team, previous work has been carried out on thread tensions, material feeding and needle penetration forces in overlock machines [3-5]. Other studies targeted needle and bobbin thread tension measurement on lockstitch machines [8-10]. 

The sewing process is a cyclic process in which several occurrences take place. The objective is to interlace thread(s) with each other and through a fabric, for the purpose of joining, finishing, protecting or decorating. Three main “sub”-processes can be identified that ideally should be monitored and/or controlled automatically: -Material feeding. Seams are produced on the fabric with a certain pattern, which is, in the simplest case, a straight line, but may also be a complicated form such as the ones used in embroidery operations. To form these patterns, the material has to be transported-“fed” by a distance that is called the stitch length. Given that industrial machines operate at very high speeds (some of them attaining 10 000 stitches per minute), the dynamics involved is complex and there are very often problems with material deformation and irregular stitch length. Some of these aspects have been addressed in [1-3, 5];

-Needle penetration. Considering again the high sewing speeds that occur, problems with needle penetration can arise due to the mechanical and thermal interaction between needle and fabric. Fabric yarns may be torn by the forces acting during needle penetration or they may fuse due to the high needle penetration produced by friction. Systems to monitor needle penetration forces during the process to detect defects and offline systems to support the choice of needles and fine-tune fabric structures and finishing to avoid these problems, would be of high value to the industry. This kind of approach has been studies by several authors, such as in [4-8].