Textiles.9.Thmb.jpg Textile mills need 10 mn new spindles: SIMA
The Indian spinning and weaving sector needs to upgrade its technology by installing 8 to 10 million new spindles to covert the surplus raw cotton into value added products, said the Southern India Mills’ Association (SIMA).
“There is an urgent need for upgrading the technology particularly in the weaving and processing sectors and improving scale of operation to improve value addition and achieve the target set by the government.” SIMA Secretary General, K Selvaraju told SME Times recently.
While the industry needs around 8 to 10 million new spindles in the spinning to covert the surplus raw cotton into value added products, another 15 to 20 million spindles are required for replacing the obsolete technology machines, he added.
Selvaraju expects that during the next fiscal 2011-12, at least 4 million spindles would be added to the capacity if the damage control exercise is undertaken by the government immediately.
Over three lakh spindles are supplied per month by three major spinning machinery manufacturers, he said.
According to the latest statistic available of the Textile Commissioner, during November 2010, total 552 textile mills were closed amongst which 471 were spinning mills and 81 were composite mills which had an installed capacity of 9.87 million spindles, 1.0 lakh rotors, 0.37 lakh looms and
3.06 lakh workers.
3.06 lakh workers.
Modular data centers push SSD storage adoption at Microsoft
Microsoft is gradually moving away from mechanical-disk storage and toward solid-state drives, starting with high-density storage applications, such as SAN. The company has started replacing spindles with speeds of 10,000RPM or faster in its data centers with SSD arrays, with plans to gradually make a total transition to SSD-based storage.
One of the main reasons is its transition to a new container-based data center design, which Microsoft manager of global operations engineering Nic Bustamante says is not very friendly with high-density storage systems comprised of mechanical disks.
“Search is number-one on our radar,” Bustamante said about the transition to SSD. Because Microsoft is competing with Google in the search market, it is looking for any edge it can gain and using SSD-based storage to support the Bing search engine helps gain some of that edge.
Bravery awards over Shrewsbury fire rescue
John Bee and Richard Brazier carried Laura Smith out of her bedroom after her family home in Severn Street, Shrewsbury, caught alight.
Mr Brazier said it was the most dramatic rescue of his 18-year firefighting career.
Ms Smith was treated for smoke inhalation but was otherwise unhurt in July’s incident.
Choking black smoke
Fire crews called to Ms Smith’s home during the early hours of 9 July said the living room and kitchen were well alight when they arrived with flames also engulfing staircase spindles and a banister.
There was choking black smoke throughout the house, they said.
The two firefighters put out the flames in the living room while heading for the burning staircase which they put out as they went upstairs.
Ms Smith was carried out of her bedroom by one firefighter as the other protected them with the hose as some flames had reignited.
The firefighters then went back into the house for her brother, Sam, but he escaped the fire by jumping from a window.
Roller Bearings with 3.25 Million dmn
The main spindles of high-speed machining centers and combined machine tools typically use duplex angular ball bearings in the front and either duplex angular ball bearings or cylindrical roller bearings in the rear. In the rear position, the high-speed performance of angular contact ball bearings is better than cylindrical roller bearings.
However, the main spindle structure is complex because the ball bushing or preload spring has to absorb thermal expansion of the shaft. On the other hand, when a cylindrical roller bearing is used, a structure absorbing thermal shaft expansion is unnecessary as the bearing itself can move axially but the high speed performance is inferior to the angular ball bearing.
Aiming to increase the speed rating of the cylindrical roller bearing while simplifying the main spindle structure, the company focused on the heat generation of the bearing, and developed an NU-type cylindrical roller bearing that allows speeds up to 3.25 million dmn.
Mill-turn productivity boost
Medical firm reports cycle time savings of nearly 30% after installing new mill-turn centre.
Drill spindle maker’s quest for speed is boosted by multi-physics motor design tool
Owned by Hitachi, Air Bearings Ltd of Poole is a world leader in ultra-high-speed drill spindles for manufacturing printed circuit boards (PCBs). Air Bearings’ products are a key element of the world’s most popular PCB drilling machines from Hitachi Via Mechanics – which drill connection vias and holes at speeds of over 10 holes/second.
Advances in PCB drill spindle motors almost invariably rely on increasing rotational speed, to improve drilling productivity and quality. Up until 2010, the Air Bearings Ltd (ABL) design team generated new motor designs using principles and know-how of air-bearing-equipped motors that had been acquired and proven over decades of business. The development process usually involved making a number of prototypes, and the team typically delivered a couple of new motor designs every year.
However, as spindle speeds increase – which over the last decade have escalated from around 80,000 to 350,000 RPM – the design challenge has become tremendous. Increasing rotational speed depends largely on reducing rotor mass. To achieve this, Air Bearings has started to extend the motor technologies it employs to improve efficiencies – from AC induction motors to permanent magnet types – and to explore the value of being able to optimise a much wider range of design parameters.
CAE tool support is viewed as essential for this more complex design environment, and ABL compared several electromagnetic simulation software packages including Opera from Cobham Technical Services – Vector Fields Software. Given the company’s focus on pushing motor performance to its absolute limits, the fidelity of the simulation process was essential, and ABL took the unusual step of comparing software design packages by correlating their predicted results against the known performance of existing motors.
“We looked at four packages. Only two of them gave us the very high simulation accuracy we needed, and of these, we chose Opera because it offered the most modelling flexibility,” says Neil Russell, ABL’s R&D Manager. “The design automation now gives us great confidence that we can improve design throughput substantially, by between five- and ten-fold, with the same headcount.”
Rotary Couplings are suited for turret style CNC lathes.
Rotary coupling system allows use of Micro Line high-speed spindles in turret style machines. Providing support for all electrical and pneumatic requirements for high-speed spindles, models are rated to IP67 and support either 2 or 4 spindles. Use of positive air over-pressure prevents coolant/chip contamination, and pneumatic supply within coupling provides air-seal to spindles. Mounted to CNC lathe turret face, couplings are able to rotate up to 500 rpm.
Index introduces MS40C six-spindle CNC machine
New multi-spindle auto delivers economic mill-turning of parts up to 40mm diameter
German multi-spindle automatic lathe manufacturer Index, has introduced a six-spindle CNC machine of 40mm bar capacity, aware that the vast majority of mill-turned components required by industry fall within this size range. The new multi sits between 32mm and 52mm capacity models in the MultiLine range, but the price is closer to that of the smaller machine.
The Index MS40C can be configured to suit customer requirements in terms of the number of cross-slides, Y-axes, and synchronous pick-up spindles
Index is arguably the largest manufacturer of this type of machine, and its range of machines the widest, encompassing a 22mm capacity model in addition to 32, 40 and 52mm – and enhanced by P and G variants with opposed spindle technology. The new MS40C can be customised with up to twelve CNC cross-slides, optional Y-axes and further equipment to enable high productivity machining of parts in one hit from up to 40mm bar stock, or chucked parts up to approximately 70mm in diameter
Application expertise in grinding
There has been a distinct shift towards highly specialised cylindrical grinding applications in the UK requiring bespoke solutions for large, high value, and growing complexity of components in difficult and unusual materials. Users, due to the high risk often associated with the type of component, are also demanding ever higher orders of production consistency over size, geometry and surface finish with an increasing requirement for machine and process reliability over extended periods of production life.
Dick Aldrich, Sales Director of RK International based in Erith, has been involved for some 12 years in meeting the progressive change in the demands of industry towards more challenging grinding solutions through RK’s relationship with Robbi, the Italian specialist in cylindrical and internal grinding. ’To be successful in providing a viable grinding solution you have to be able to respond with ever-higher application-specific solutions particularly for aerospace and defence,’ he says. ’Due to the level of application expertise and problem solving capability available through Robbi, this has opened doors to successful installations as diverse as wind turbine, rollers for the food industry and machine tool bearings.’
Breaking new ground is the Omicron T5 universal sliding-gap machine with a capacity of up to 1,000mm dia by 2,030mm between centres. It has two wheelheads each having hydrodynamic spindles which are carried on independent carriages on its cast iron bed. It incorporates a split table that also enables long tapers to be ground. As both wheelheads are totally independent, they can be applied to separately grind both a face and OD with the advantage of applying different wheels and grinding data.
Controlled by Siemens 810 D the wheelhead can be rotated 180 deg with an index swivel of 2.5 deg using either manual or auto-positioning. Using the PLC based control, up to eight different diameters can be programmed on the same part, each having total independence for setting factors such as speeds, feeds and spark-out routines. Marposs Micromar E9 can also be incorporated for precise closed-loop control of the process. The machine also has the option to carry an internal spindle for integrated external, face and internal processing.
Horizontal Machining Center offers spindle speed of 6,000 rpm.
