DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTATION FOR OPTIMIZATION OF PROCESS PARAMETERS OF MINI COTTON CARDING MACHINE USING TAGUCHI METHOD

One of the significant preprocessing operations in the yarn making for Khadi is carding. In the present study a mini carding machine has been designed, fabricated and analyzed for optimum productivity of cotton sliver suitable for roving. Roving is the raw material for hank which is needed by weavers to hand-craft the cloth (Khadi). This work deals with the Taguchi design of experimentation for finalization of performance parameters and geometrical parameters of a scale down model of cotton carding machine. In the study the effect on rate of production per unit working area and the sliver quality have been investigated using different process parameters and geometrical parameters and their levels. The process parameters include speed of Feed Roller, speed of licker in cylinder, speed of main cylinder; speed of doffer whereas geometrical parameter includes working area of cylinder. This paper reveals the detail planning and conduction of experimentation using L27 orthogonal array. The optimum parameter combination is obtained using the analysis of signal to noise ratio and the levels of process parameters influencing the production rate per unit working area are determined by using analysis of variance (ANOVA). As per the response graph working area of the machine is observed the most significant parameter affecting the productivity of the machine. The confirmation experiments validated the optimum values.