Page 193 - Industrial Cutting of Textile Materials

180 Industrial Cutting of Textile Materials

Spreading Cutting with a band knife

Cutting with a straight or rotary knife
Fig. 11.1 Placement of workstations in manual cutting processes.

Fig. 11.2 Location of a band-knife machine in a cutting room.

room area is usually occupied by more than one spreading line for fabric spreading,
holding, and/or transfer tables for short-time storing/relaxing of ready spreads and
one or more automated cutting systems to perform cutting, marking, labelling, and
off-loading of the cut components.
Often, automated spreading and cutting processes have different capacities. The
capacity of a spreading machine depends on the length of the spread and its number
of plies. A longer and higher spread requires more time to complete and vice versa.
The capacity of an automated cutting system depends on several parameters. It is
influenced more by the number and size of components to be cut (the total length of
cut lines in a spread) than by the height of the spread, which affects the cutting time.
Usually, the productivity of an automated cutting process is higher than that of the
spreading process, so more than one spreading machine has to operate with one cutting
system. To organize a synchronized work process in this situation, several spreading
tables are placed parallel to each other, with the fabric feeding/loading systems (see
Section 11.3.3) at their one end (see Fig. 11.3A). The cutting system is mounted on
rails at the other end of the spreading lines (see Fig. 11.3B) to move across the spread-
ing tables and to process spreads prepared on different spreading lines (see Fig. 11.4).
The imbalance between sequentially performed spreading and cutting operations
may also appear when working with orders consisting of small quantities (when fabric
spreads have small number of fabric lays). In a reversal of the previously described