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The movement characteristics of yarn in the profiled reed groove of an air-jet loom can have a great impact on the performance of the fabric. Unstable yarn movement tends to lead to weft defects, as short wefts or weft breaks may occur, which could deteriorate the quality of the final fabric. In this paper, the characteristics of the yarn movement in a profiled reed groove are numerically studied. The arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian method is used to solve the two-way airflow–yarn interaction and the yarn is simulated with the ball–socket model. A fluctuation ratio is defined to characterize the unsteadiness of the yarn movement. Our simulation first investigates the effect of the gap ratio of the profiled reed groove (β) on the yarn movement then compares the movements of different yarn kinds. The simulation results indicate that a larger β not only decreases gas leaks (thus saves gas consumption), but also stabilizes the yarn movement. Our simulation results also show that the movement of the yarn of polypropylene is more stable than the other two weft-yarn materials. An experiment is also conducted to validate our numerical results, which shows a favorable agreement between them. Our numerical results of the yarn movement in the profiled reed groove can provide a valuable insight into the optimization of the weft insertion system of the air-jet loom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rotor spinning is an open-end spinning method that uses air as the medium to transform the fibers into yarn. Nowadays, the properties of its final product—yarn—such as yarn strength and yarn twist, are not satisfied due to the fiber morphology, which greatly depends on the distribution of the massive fibers in the rotor spinning unit (RSU). In this paper, theoretical analysis is given to describe the trajectory of fiber on the slide wall. A numerical study is performed with the massive fibers being simplified into granules to study their distribution characteristics in the RSU. According to our numerical results, the forming process of the fibrous ring is discussed and the effects of two variables, the rotor speed and the angle of the slide wall, on the distribution of fiber granules were also studied. The simulation results indicate that the fiber granules are not evenly distributed during their transport in the fiber transport channel (FTC) and they tend to accumulate on the upper and lower edge of the FTC. The distribution of fiber granules in the groove (fibrous rings) is closely related to the rotor speed. The higher the rotor speed, the longer and thinner the fibrous ring. The distribution of fiber granules on the slide wall is related to the angle of the slide wall such that a smaller angle leads to a scattered distribution on the slide wall, while a larger angle tends to bring a concentrated one. The simulation results show good agreements with our experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The air-jet loom is widely used in the textile industry and the main nozzle is one of its key components. In this paper, the influence of some parameters, including the input air pressure and the structure of nozzle core and its internal diameter, on the internal flow field of the main nozzle is analyzed. Then the optimized structure of the main nozzle is proposed from the perspective of fluid dynamics. In the present simulations, the realizable k-ɛ model is applied to model the internal flow field of the main nozzle. The results show that the velocity in the annular throat reaches supersonic. Moreover, the pressure at the end of the nozzle core is the lowest in the main nozzle. It is also shown that the input air pressure has little effect on the axis velocity in Zone B, but on the other hand, has a great influence on the near-wall velocity field and the axis velocity in Zone C. In addition, an optimized structure of the nozzle core is proposed in this paper. It is found that with the proposed structure, the velocity boundary layer near the wall of Zone B in the accelerating tube can be well improved, and rapid diffusion of airflow in this area can be avoided. These help increase the moving speed of the weft yarn. Last but not least, we also show that decreasing of the internal diameter of the nozzle core improves the axis velocity of the weft accelerating tube. However, it brings a stronger turbulence at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]