SIZE AS WELL AS PERFORMANCE COUNTS FOR TEXTILE TESTING EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURER

The textile industry has very demanding quality standards. There are internationally and nationally recognised ones whilst others are imposed individually by merchants and retailers. They embrace every stage of a fabric’s life, right from the yarn through to the finished product and cover such characteristics as strength, colour fastness and pilling & abrasion.

Accordingly, suppliers/customers need to verify that the product complies with the appropriate standards and specialist equipment manufacturers provide the tools to achieve this. A leader in the field of fabric testing equipment is the UK company James H. Heal, of Halifax, which exports almost all of its instruments to all parts of the world.

Because of the competitive nature of the business, James H. Heal is always striving to ensure its equipment satisfies the demands of the global fabric/textile industry and permits the specified tests to be performed effectively. It was in order to fulfil this on-going commitment that the company introduced a new tumble dryer recently, the ‘Accudry2’. This is a standardised tumble dryer specifically designed for laboratory stability tests.

Domestic tumble dryers suffer from a wide variation in performance from machine to machine and therefore the results of any testing can differ. Accudry2 has been designed to be easy to use and offers excellent reliability

The Design Team needed an EMC filter of the highest quality. In addition the space envelope allowed for the filter was very small.

Chris Hargreaves, Senior Electronics Designer for James H. Heal contacted his EMC Test House who suggested we try REO UK of Craven Arms who manufactures a wide range of filters and had provided solutions for a number of its customers previously.

“A check on REO’s web site and a telephone call resulted in a suitably rated single-phase filter that could fit into the space allowed being shipped from stock. This was fitted to the Accudry2 and following re-testing, received a pass certificate.
Since then James H. Heal has installed REO filters in all its Accudry2 dryers and has also adopted a 3-phase unit for its new ‘Gyrowash’ which batch washes fabric samples in different solutions simultaneously – sometimes with steel balls for accelerated abrasion testing.

REO offers an extensive range of both single and 3-phase EMC filters. Single-phase units cover from 3 A to 180 A and the 3-phase units from 3 A to 1600 A. The filter supplied for the Accudry2 is 250V/16A/50-60Hz rated and the 3-phase unit used for the Gyrowash is rated 3x440V/4x25A/50-60Hz.

For further information on EMC filters, and related topics, visit the REO website and download Handbooks from the extensive library available.