Spinning Frame

drawing frame

 or spinning frame

Machine for drawing, twisting, and winding yarn. Invented in the 1730s by Lewis Paul and John Wyatt, the spinning machine operated by drawing cotton or wool through pairs of successively faster rollers. It was eventually superseded by R. Arkwright's water frame.

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Spinning Frame 

a machine that produces yarn from roving or sliver; it completes the treatment of fibrous material in spinning. There are different types of machines for spinning cotton, bast fibers, wool, and silk waste. Yarn made of chemical fibers is spun on machines designed for natural fibers.

All types of fiber can be spun on the continuous-action ring spinning frame, on which the semifinished product undergoes attenuation, producing a thin sliver. The machine twists the sliver into yarn and winds the yarn into a package. The roving, which is wound off the bobbin, passes through the feeding mechanism of the drafting device. After leaving the drafting device, the sliver is twisted into yarn, which is then directed into the yarn carrier, passed through the traveler mounted on the ring, and wound onto a bobbin or a similar holder on the spindle. The yarn has a twist (ratio number of turns per length) of 50–140. The spindles turn the yarn at 10,000–12,000 rpm, and the rings are 30–60 mm in diameter. (Foreign-made ring spinning frames have spindle speeds of 15,000–17,000 rpm and ring diameters of 30–70 mm.) Ring spinning frames have reached their maximum possibilities in terms of productivity and yarn quality.

Spindleless spinning frames have been developed, which separate lumps of fiber into individual fibers, transport the flow of separate fibers, and combine or thicken the fibers to form a continuous product. The fibers are twisted into yarn, which is then wound. The most widely used spindleless spinning frame is a pneumatic machine developed by Soviet and Czech specialists in the late 1960’s. The sliver or roving is directed by a feed cylinder to a combing roller, where it is separated into individual fibers or groups of fibers. The fibers are then fed by air through a duct to a high-speed spinning chamber (30,000–60,000 rpm). A fibrous sliver is formed at the top of the chamber owing to the stacking of the fibers by the rings. In other words, a cyclic plying occurs that equalizes the linear density of the fiber flow by 15 to 20 times. The spinning of the chamber imparts twist to the portion of the sliver moving from the inside wall of the chamber to the opening of the guiding tube. The finished yarn is removed from the chamber by delivery rollers and then wound onto the bobbin. It has a twist ratio of 160–190.

The open-end spinning frame is two or three times more efficient than the ring spinning frame in the production of yarn of equal thickness. The packages weigh 1.5 kg, which makes it possible, in most cases, to use the yarn directly in weaving. A package of similar yarn from a ring spinning frame weighs 120–140 g.

Self-twisting spinning frames have been developed for spinning combed yarn from wool and chemical fibers.

The development of the open-end spinning frame is directed toward increasing spinning speed, improving fiber-separation devices, reducing yarn twist while simultaneously increasing yarn strength, producing a variety of yarn thicknesses, and automating bobbin removal.

For a discussion of the history of spinning frames, see.

REFERENCES

Sherstopriadil’noe oborudovanie. Moscow, 1966.
Mekhanicheskaia tekhnologiia voloknistykh malerialov. Moscow, 1969.
Sevost’ianov, A. G., and N. I. Shilova. Bezveretennoe priadenie. Moscow, 1969.