Fiber and Biopolymer Research Institute

The Fiber and Biopolymer Research Institute is a researches for cotton breeders and public agencies. On the first day of our field trip to the institute our guide Mr. Arain gave us a private tour that was not much unlike the television show “How it’s Made”. He walked us through the different factory rooms which all had different functions, and taught us about the equipment that was used there.

We started out in the warehouse and saw the massive bundles of cotton there waiting to be cleaned and spun. From there we saw two different processes for cleaning the fibers, carding and combing. The carding and combing processes are a mechanical process which breaks up the fiber and then puts them back together so they are running parallel with each other rather than clumping and crossing, making them into the yarn form so that they can be spun. The combed yarn is more pricy because the combing process requires additional work and cost to manufacture after the alignment process. There are four processes after combing before the yarn can be spun; those steps are lap former, where slivers are fed to form a lap to a compact form. After that the comber goes through the fibers and smoothes them out creating a finer more luxurious yarn quality. Slivers of different fibers are twisted together to form a blended strand through a process called roving. After all of these long processes the yarn is finally ready to be spun. The spinning and winding room was probably the most interesting, huge long machines stretched the length of the room each with their own spinning tools. some used ring spinning, which is a method used to spin yarn in a continuous process. After the yarn is spun it is wound around a colorful plastic rotating spinner. Yarn is used to make textiles and fabrics through a variety of processes, we where shown the process of weaving at the very end of our tour.

The Carding process is much less demanding of a process than the combing process. Like the combing process the carding process uses wires to separate the fivers and pull them into parallel lines. A clump of fibers is formed and then pulled through a machine into a strand of parallel fibers that resembles a soft rope. Carded yarn goes through an open-end spinning process, which doesn’t use a spindle like the ring spinning process. The Example that our guide used is to imagine opening a clothes dryer while it is still rotating and grab the sleeve of a shirt and start pulling, not only would the shirt be pulled from the dryer but a long line of clothes would follow attached like a string of yarn. Because the individual strands, like the clothes, are spun together as they are pulled out and the wrapped onto one of the colorful plastic bobbins. The open-end spinning method is much faster and much less labor intensive than the ring spinning method, however the open-end method is used only for courser counts of fiber so the fabrics made from the open-end method have a lot more fuzz and are not as resistant to wear and tear.

Overall the tour of the Fiber and Biopolymer Research Institute was  informational and a good experience. not only did we learn about the machines but it helped us to understand why specific fabrics where used for different and varying applications. The knowledge gained from this particular experience will certainly be used in our design future.