On-line sensing of the interlacing process

Interlacing is commonly used in textile industries to produce cohesion points (knots) in a multi-filament yarn. The knots distance needs to be controlled on-line since its regularity guarantees a homogeneous appearance of the final fabric. Here, we investigated two techniques for the on-line monitoring of the multi-filament yarn interlacing. The high speed imaging of the yarn motion in an interlacer allowed us to identify the yarn width as a parameter that describes on-line the process and measures the knots distance and its distribution. Employing a vibration analysis, we determined a characteristic frequency that could be induced by the interlacing process. This is a first result for the possible implementation in textile industries of a cheap accelerometer based knots sensing technique.