Unrolling, relaxing, or inspecting fabrics? Each process serves a unique and specific purpose in production, whether it’s organizing the fabric, ensuring its stability, or guaranteeing final quality.
The key is knowing when to apply each process. Only then can you make strategic decisions and choose the ideal machine for textile industry.
1. Unrolling
The unrolling process refers to the stage in which the textile material is folded into standardized laps of a specified width. Therefore, it’s responsible for preparing the fabric for the subsequent stages of the production line.
This step is important for maintaining workflow organization, contributing to:
- Easier storage;
- More efficient transportation;
- More accurate daily handling.
That’s because unrolling (or lap folding) helps reduce fabric tension and twisting, preventing possible deformations. As a result, it’s an essential step in fabric preparation, especially before the relaxing and inspection processes.
Textile automation at this stage ensure consistent and precise results. Textile machines, such as fabric lap folders, perform the folding process automatically while optimizing space utilization.
> Read also: What to Consider When Choosing New Machinery for Your Industry
When should you unroll fabric?
Unrolling or lap folding can be done whenever it’s necessary to organize and prepare the material. For example:
- After production or knitting: to make handling easier and reduce fabric tension;
- Before relaxing or inspection: folding the fabric into laps ensures it is evenly organized for the next stages;
- For internal transport or storage: facilitates stacking and prevents deformations during movement.
2. Relaxing
Relaxing fabric refers to the controlled resting of the material. The goal is to reduce internal tensions, such as curling, deformation, shrinkage, or dimensional changes.
This helps prevent errors in subsequent stages, such as spreading, cutting, and sewing. By relaxing the fabric, it returns to its natural and stable form, ensuring uniformity and final quality in every piece produced.
For this, a Relaxing Machine can be used to perform the process efficiently, providing immediate roll-to-roll relaxation and eliminating the conventional 24 to 48-hour resting period.
With automatic calculation of weight, yield and fabric grammage, the machine delivers precise information on the width and length of each roll, preventing dimensional defects in cut pieces.
Additionally, this solution automates and standardizes the entire textile process and allows integration with ERP systems, ensuring faster, more reliable, and organized production.
When should you relax fabric?
Textile fabric should be relaxed whenever it has internal tensions that could compromise its dimensional stability. For example:
- After weaving or knitting: newly produced fabric tends to have natural internal tensions from the process;
- After rolling: rolling can cause deformations or distortions in the fabric;
- Before cutting and sewing: to prevent deformed pieces or size variations.
3. Inspecting
Finally, fabric inspection is the stage dedicated to a detailed examination of the material, aiming to identify and correct defects such as tears, loose threads, stains, and deformations.
Just like in the previous processes, this step helps prevent rework, reduce waste, and ensure that every piece produced has consistent quality.
In this stage, an Inspection Machine identifies defects and provides a complete mapping of the inspected raw material.
As a result, this machine can increase productivity by up to 100% by providing precise control over the number of defects.
Fabric inspection not only ensures quality but also optimizes time, labor, and costs, making the production line more efficient and reliable.
> Read also: Why does your production need a Delta Mesh Checker?
When should you inspect fabric?
Fabric should be inspected when the goal is to eliminate defects before the final production stages. For example:
- After production or knitting: to identify defects generated during fabric manufacturing;
- Before cutting or packaging: to prevent defective pieces from advancing along the line and causing rework.
Unrolling, relaxing, and inspecting fabric are distinct processes!
Unrolling, relaxing, and inspecting are complementary stages, not substitutes! Each plays an essential role in the production process.
Trying to combine or skip steps can compromise results, causing textile waste, rework, and quality loss.
That’s why having specific machines for each process is a differentiator that translates into productivity, precision, and consistent results.
At Delta, every piece of equipment is designed to go beyond basic operation! With embedded automation and artificial intelligence, our solutions:
- Connect information across production stages;
- Reduce human errors;
- Raise the quality standard of your industry.
How about taking the next step to ensure a more efficient and integrated factory?
