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They are designed to find and catalog defects in a wide variety of fabrics including greige fabrics, sheeting, apparel fabrics, upholstery fabrics, industrial fabrics, tire cord, finished fabrics, piece-dyed fabrics and denim.
The Human Factor
Typical fabric inspection speeds and fatigue limit most human inspectors to detecting from 40 to 60 percent of defects. Automated fabric inspection systems' capability to find fabric defects at 80 to 95 percent. Finally it takes years to train a good human inspector, and these automated systems can be installed and "trained" in a matter of weeks.
Fabric Scan
Fabriscan, can inspect fabric at speeds up to 120 meters per minute and can detect defects down to a resolution of 0.3 millimeters. It can handle fabric widths from 110 to 440 centimeters. Zellweger Uster has several installations in Europe covering range greige fabrics including apparel, denim and industrial fabrics. The cost for Fabriscan starts at $200,000. Zellweger Uster estimates that the system has a payback of about 12 to 24 months, based on labor savings, cut optimization, and improved flagging accuracy to customers.
The Future: Expect Automated Inspection to Grow
As the MFA Quotas came down in 2005, it will be possible to source fabric worldwide. Garment manufacturers as well as industrial fabrics users will increasingly need a comprehensive, consistent way to establish the quality of goods. In addition, the digital maps that automated inspection systems provide, which reliably pinpoint defects, may well be required by the cutter. EVS has been working for years to brand fabrics inspected with its system using "I-Tex Inspected" stickers. The ability of a mill to certify that its fabrics have undergone automated fabric inspection could very well become a requirement for certain applications or markets.
New Developments in testing fabrics
Objective Measurement
The above table shows that manufacturers have been primarily concerned with visible defects.
There is a growing awareness that there are numerous fabric properties which are invisible, but nevertheless have important consequences for manufacturing and customer satisfaction.
The challenge of the future is the efficient large scale production of high quality textile materials and garments using fully automated machinery. These products will be demanded by consumer requiring good product appearance plus reasonable durability and performance. In order to achieve these, The Kawabatata Evaluation System is developed which is the scientific system of objective evaluation for the quality, appearance and practical characteristics of textile materials and garments. This equipment designed to find out the handle property of the fabric by objective measurement of stresses in tension, shearing forces, bending forces, and to sense surface friction and surface smoothness, weight of the fabric.
Conclusion
As the Fabric constitutes 90-95% of the garment it is very important to assure the quality of the fabric by the new approach as discussed above such as Purchasing by specification., Automated Fabric inspection System, New Testing methods of Fabric. The New quality control approach gives the following benefits such as:
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