Spinalex outlines outstanding experience
Egyptian cotton often contains a high level of contamination by white polypropylene (PP). So it’s a serious issue for spinning mills in Egypt which rely on the local raw material.
An interesting report on this issue comes from Spinalex, one of the leading spinning companies in Egypt. Spinalex, established in 1959, produces annually 1,200 tons of yarn with a count range of NE 30 up to NE 60 (carded or combed) and over NE 60 up to NE 140 (combed only), single and double, for weaving or hosiery waxed. The company today employs 2,400 workers in four mills with about 155,000 spindles. One of the mills, operating 50,000 spindles, was equipped with old USTER yarn clearers as well as clearers with a PP option from another supplier.
So the mill management decided to test the PP detection capability of the latest USTER QUANTUM 3 clearers. With its existing clearer set-up (from another supplier), the expectations of Spinalex were not met – expectations of removal of as many PP defects as possible with acceptable loss in production efficiencies. And even with close clearing limits, PP contamination went undetected. 
This was evident by simply rewinding some of the NE 50 cotton yarn previously cleared with Spinalex’s existing equipment, but using USTER QUANTUM 3 – which immediately picked up several remaining PP defects in 350 km of the yarn.
As a double-check, the customer then ran the yarn cleared using the USTER QUANTUM 3 through the other supplier’s equipment. The clearer from the other supplier did not detect any real remaining PP defect in the yarn.
The impressive performance of USTER QUANTUM 3 PP clearing was emphasized in further tests with a Ne 60 cotton yarn. Here, the USTER QUANTUM 3 detected PP defects as small as 4mm in length (Fig. 3) with great accuracy and with a setting that generated overall only 3 cuts per 100 km (Fig. 4).
After the trial, Eng. Refaat Helal, Chairman and Managing Director of Spinalex, was convinced of the performance of the USTER QUANTUM 3 and its PP clearing feature. “Quantum 3 could remove even the smallest PP defects without adding unnecessary cuts that would affect production efficiency”, he says.