Brintons Ltd, the world's largest manufacturer of high-quality woven Axminster carpets, recently completed the construction and commissioning of a state-of-the-art £6 million brown-field package-dyehouse, adjacent to its existing premises in Kidderminster, UK. Barco's SedoMaster system is at the heart of the automation process, integrating the control of the dye machines on site with other automated systems in the dyehouse.

Officially opened in December 2003 by HRH Prince Andrew, the new facility supplies over 50,000 kilos of yarn a week to Brintons' fine-quality Axminster carpet looms, which equates to approximately 36,000 sq metres of carpet. In order to maximise the return on the major investment in the new dyehouse, and to make significant cost savings in the production process, Brintons specified the latest technology for all material, chemical and dyestuff movement, which requires virtually no operator intervention.

A Barco SedoMaster central supervisory system, supplied and installed by BarcoVision Ltd, of Blackburn, Lancashire, is at the heart of the automation process. The SedoMaster system manages 16 Sedomat 3500 dye-machine controllers that fully automate each of the Pozzi dye machines on the site and enables them to integrate with other automated systems within the dyehouse.

"We've worked with Barco for more than twenty years and developed our business alongside their technology. Their controllers were installed at our original Kidderminster dyehouse in No 1 Building. Our Telford stock dyehouse use their Beacon range of dye machine controllers and on our Axminster weaving looms their Dextralog system monitors weaving performance," explained Richard Miszkowkski, dyed yarn supply chain manager.

"We were approached by another supplier but preferred to work with Barco, who we know and trust to give us the support we require when we need it. It's proved to be a good decision because the installation and the integration with the third-party automated systems were flawless, seamless and painless."

The automated process starts when a bill of materials is created from the weaving schedule, and that, in turn, creates a dyeing schedule, which is fed into the Barco SedoMaster supervisory management system. The SedoMaster planning board links to a rule based recipe system, which provides it with all the necessary recipe parameters and variables, so that optimised recipes can be generated automatically.

The SedoMaster also manages the automated chemical dispensing, together with the automated dyestuff preparation and distribution. Everything is automated except for weighing powdered materials. The required programs are downloaded to the multi-tasking Sedomat 3500 controllers. Each controller has its own graphical touch-panel for full visibility of batches in the current dyeing process and performance monitoring. The process sequence is predefined within the SedoMaster and, once active, the operator has the process sequence, set points and events clearly defined.

Brintons' Tropos business administration system downloads the job schedule to the SedoMaster system, which back-flushes the completed job information to ensure that the necessary departments are empowered with accurate information. They can tell immediately whether the yarn is undyed, in the dyeing process or waiting to go into the warehouse.

Jobs are scheduled on a SedoMaster planning/scheduling board in the control room where all the Sedomat 3500 controllers are remotely supervised and monitored against predetermined performance standards. Data is automatically archived for reference if there should be a quality issue. To complete the process, the SedoMaster is also linked to an automated materials handling and warehouse system.

Richard Miszkowkski comments: "The real savings here are in the reduction in cost per kilo of yarn coming out of this dyehouse, which has only been achieved through automation. SedoMaster has played a very significant role in making these savings happen by integrating with third party systems and managing our automation. It's a very reliable and robust system. We also benefit from the productivity, reduced wastage, speed of turn round and accuracy that the latest technology provides."

February 2005
For more articles like this one see....
International Dyer
	Unrivalled specialised coverage of the textile dyeing, printing and finishing industry world-wide.