A NEW TECHNIQUE FOR FEEDING YARN IN A FLAT BED KNITTING MACHINE

The quality of knitted fabric panels is of considerable importance to the knitwear industries. The latest development in flat bed knitting t echnology improves the efficiency of the production by knitting fully fashioned fabric panels that are to exact shape and size. This greatly reduces the cutting waste and length of time for the making-up proces s, but garment manufacturers are still facing the difficulty of retain ing dimensional stability of the knitted panels. One of the significan t factors influencing this undesired property is input yarn tension va riation. The analysis of this problem is described and a new method of yarn feeding is also suggested. This method utilizes storage yarn fee d to eliminate the undesired effect of yarn feed speed variation and h as been applied as a prototype. The results show a promising and satis factory improvement in the fabric quality.