In present market, the fabric inspection machine price differs by technology and practicality. The Swiss company developed the USS automatic fabric inspection technology which formed an automatic fabric inspection system to check fabric defects automatically and to mark where the defects are and store them for a better defect location and optimized the production process technology. It can replace inspecting cloth manually in a certain range, also is a remarkable development of cotton and fabric industry. People also believe that it will be applied in the textile machinery industry gradually and will replace manual fabric inspection completely .

Why We Need Automatic Fabric Inspection Technology

The traditional fabric inspection method is to inspect the defects manually. The common method is one person conducts one fabric inspection machine in full inspection of the produced fabrics. It is suitable for all kinds of fabrics, from simple colored fabrics to embroidered fabrics, from single dyed to whole printed dyed fabrics, from plain weave fabrics to three-dimensional fabrics, etc. It is possible to meet all the inspection requirements of various fabrics by a serious fabric inspector. He or she can identify all kinds of defects through inspection process then classify them. However, as the reliability and focus of manual fabric inspection cannot meet the production efficiency of fabrics products with the continuous improvement of loom output. Manual fabric inspection can only be concentrated within 20-30 minutes, after which there will be missed inspections and the maximum defects that can be inspected within 1 hour by manual inspection is only 200 defects. Although manual fabric inspection is still widely used in some fields, the emergence of high-speed and more reliable automatic fabric inspection system shows strong vitality and becomes the development direction of fabric inspection work.

ST-ACI-I

Development of Automatic Fabric Inspection Machine

There has been research on automatic fabric inspection since the 1970s. The development of the level of auto inspecting and monitoring in fabric production process reduced a series of problems that may caused by yarn stress when in a weaving process. However,  it is still essential to level up the technology of comprehensive inspection of all fabrics and cloth. Although the quality of fabrics have been improved in the past year, to inspect the fabric material is an indispensable part during production process, because we can find out all the machine faults may occur during production from the defects that detected from the fabric. The Swiss Uster company developed an automatic fabric inspection system in 1983, one of their automatic fabric inspection machine called Uster Visotexhas been exhibited at the Paris Exhibition in 1999, which was applied in some fabric factories, but there was a limitation of automatic fabric inspection machine development at that time due to the expensive machine price and limited scope of fabric that can be inspected. These 2 main limitations have been broken until the production process has formed a network of information transporting with flexible adaptability in developed countries so that the automatic fabric inspection machine has expanded its ability to identify defects in a wider range, and finally be applied in a wide scale. Additionally, textile enterprises reduced the demand for hardware by using high-performance microprocessors that can work in parallel due to the development of electronic computer technology and microelectronic technology. It means the manufacturing cost is decreasing.

The Identify Defects Ability Of Automatic Fabric Inspection Machine

1. The defect discriminator of the Uster automatic fabric inspection system applies random network technology that is derived from computer technology. Its processing capacity is up to 250 by using a special microprocessor to process and generate video;

2. The random network is dedicated, which can identify the defects then complete the identification of the appearances and characteristics of the defects of given fabric material by the USTER microprocessor.

With the development of automatic textile technology, there are well-formed automatic production line, automatic monitoring and automatic information, which has made textile production step into a new stage. Automatic fabric inspection tech is an inevitable product of the revolution of automatic fabric industry from by manual to by machine, it has the functions of inspecting fabric defects, grading recurring defects that cannot be achieved by manual power so that the automatic fabric inspection system is bound to replace the manual fabric inspection. The automatic fabric inspection system instead of manual inspection is a revolution in the quality & production management of the inspection process and is corresponds to the yarn evenness meter that has been used for 50 years.The automatic inspection of fabrics has moved towards the road of automatic full inspection.