Revolutionary textile processing machine 'AIRO24' at ITME

14 Nov '08

5 min read

Massimo Biancalani, co-owner and technical director of Biancalani S.p.A., explains how AIRO®24 came from a few simple considerations:
- The AIRO® treatment is universally known as the only one able to add a high value to any kind of fabric, delivering softness, volume and dimensional stability.
- Eco-sustainability and energy saving are nowadays essential issues for any company willing to stand out in the global panorama.
- A continuous process, which can increase productivity compared to a batch process, ensures the textile finisher a lower production cost and therefore a higher market competitivity.
- Textile finishing companies prefer to work in open-width, resorting to rope processing only when there are no other ways. Open-width finishing processes minimize pilling effects and ensure – in a natural way – the complete absence of marks and creases.

"The concept is simple" – adds Massimo Biancalani – " AIRO®24 has been designed in order to achieve (and exceed), with low consumptions and minimal processing cost per meter, the results of a traditional AIRO®, working in continuous mode and in open width, completely avoiding the need to work in rope form, thanks to an extremely efficient treatment duct, smooth and free from any mechanical moving parts, which maximizes the efficiency of the ventilation, increasing the treatment speed and therefore the energy of the fabric being ejected against the treatment grids, and the drying capacity".

And air speed, more than temperature, is the factor which most influences the drying times of the textile surface. The high exchange capacity between air and fabric that the ejector can deliver, forces the water particles to easily detach from the fibers with the mechanical action provided by air itself. This is done without the need to forcibly recirculate the exhausted air, which would pointlessly increase the treatment time. The airflow system in AIRO®24 allows this recirculation to occur in a dynamic and natural way, proportionally to the amount of humidity contained in the fabric, without wasting any energy and in a perfectly clean way.

"Talking about cleanliness, something which is really valued by users", says Giuseppe Capaccioli, technologist since almost 30 years in Biancalani, "is the possibility to process different articles, stitched together, without any color contamination and without ever needing to stop the machine for cleaning operations". The secret is not in the dimension or number of the filters, but in their position within the whole air path, which has to allow the lint to be removed and sent to the filter instantaneously, in the same moment when they detach from the fabric, without any accumulation along the fabric path.

Efficiency without down times: also this is the result of a specifically targeted and competent design. At Biancalani, designers of AIRO®24 like to define the machine in one sentence as "efficient by design". Following the commercial success of this machine, it's easy to say that the new AIRO®24 was already a grown-up adult in the moment it was born: from the first prototype to machine number fifty sold after little more than one year, only minimal modification have been introduced.

And it's exactly this ability of turning an idea into a best-seller that – within the international textile machinery market – identifies Biancalani as a company always able to innovate with coherence and continuity.

Biancalani

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