Historic Indian Ginning Plant Supplies Modern Spinning Mill
A historic ginning plant and a modern spinning mill - do they go together? The answer is yes, if the basic conditions are right.
By Hermann Selker
S ri Venkata Siva Parvathi Spinning Mills in Guntur, India, specializes in the production of combed ring yarns of a count Ne 60. Trumac DK 780 cards — from Ahmedabad, India-based Trumac Engineering Co. Pvt. Ltd., a joint venture between India-based A.T.E. and Germany-based Trützschler GmbH & Co. KG — operate in the mill. The rest of the installation also is modern. Like many other spinning mills in Guntur and the surrounding area, cotton is supplied by a dedicated ginning plant, in this case, located on the other side of the road. This yields the first advantage straight away: There is no need to press the cotton into bales.
Precleaning is carried out using hand-operated drums. The heavy particles falling through the grates - mostly residues of seeds with adherent fibers - are processed separately to produce an inferior quality for coarse rotor yarns.
Staff costs are of little
consequence. The quality demands on the cotton are very high, and electrical energy is expensive.
Those basic conditions suddenly make an old ginning technique seem sensible.
In the ginning plant of Maddali Giridhar Rao, approximately 45 metric tons of cotton can be
processed per day. Because the output is approximately 33 percent, 15 metric tons of cotton are
processed per day. Of that total, the company’s own spinning mill needs 4 metric tons per day, and
the rest is sold to local customers. Depending on the season, the company operates one or two
10-hour shifts.
Foreign matter and coarse impurities are removed by hand.
The machinery in the ginning plant consists of two precleaners and 18 Platt double roller gins dating from 1900. Their age is clearly apparent from the outside, but the actual working components, which have been refined and optimized increasingly over the course of time, come from specialists in India. This prompts a productivity comparison with current gin technology: A modern saw gin in the United States has an output that is more than 60 times greater. However, a quality comparison clearly favors the old ginning system. The cotton, which emerges from the gins at a rate of just 40 kilograms per hour (kg/h), is virtually trash- and nep-free. A modern saw gin, operating at around 2,400 kg/h, cannot match this.
The cleaned fibers are packed in bags and delivered to the spinning mills.
The traditional cotton from the region around Guntur is the type MCU 5. It is superbly suited to the yarn count of Ne 60 that is the norm there. In conjunction with the historic gin technology, it is unbeatable. During a recent visit, the current price was 72 rupees per kilogram (RS/kg). A comparable Giza 86 from Egypt, which is also used for Ne 60 yarns, was around 120 RS/kg.
The separated seeds are transported via an underfloor feed screw to a collecting pit that passes into an oil mill nearby for the production of food-grade oil.
There also is an advantage for the national economy. An Indian ginning plant of this kind provides employment for several dozen staff and requires less of the scarce energy available.
Editor's Note: Hermann Selker is head of marketing for Germany-based Trützschler GmbH & Co. KG.
July/August 2006
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