Yarn tension control technique for improving polyester soft winding process

The textile industry has a great role in the improvement of any country’s economy. Moreover, the ready-made garments need different coloured high yarn quality, so yarn should be rewinded on plastic cones for dyeing. However, manufacturers are facing the problem of tension variation during soft winding process that mainly affects the yarn quality. Consequently, to overcome the tension variation drawbacks, the attainment of constant optimal tension values is required in order to: (1) Increase the winding speed while maintaining the yarn quality, (2) Improve the dyeing quality, and (3) Reduce the water consumption during the dyeing process. In this paper, a proposed yarn tension control technique is introduced to upgrade the soft winding machine, thus maintain the yarn quality and improve the manufacturing capacity. The proposed technique has been tested on Polyester yarn samples classified as; fine, medium and coarse yarn counts, to cover most yarn sizes used in the industry. Arduino Mega 2560 controller is utilized to implement the proposed tension control. The results are compared to the conventional system to advocate the effectiveness and capability of the proposed technique in overcoming the trade-off between tension control and machine speed that occurs in conventional system using variable tension levels.