French manufacturers prepare for ITMA with real optimism

The French manufacturers export on average about 1 billion Euros (1.4 billion USD), their strategy is to bring value to their customers thanks to R&D efforts and a strong commitment to customers’ service. Although these companies are specialty manufacturers & SMEs, but are world leaders or among the world leaders on specific applications. They are particularly strong in weaving preparation, nonwovens, and in specialized spinning, dyeing and finishing machinery.

After a very difficult year in 2009, they prepare ITMA ASIA+CITME 2010 with a real optimism. Asian countries like China and India are already recovering, the US seem to emerge from the slump as well as Europe.

Investments start to pick up again and a very important incentive to invest is the development of new products which need new production technologies.

“Clearly, we see warmer prospects since the end of 2009. Spare parts business is getting back to usual levels which mean the utilization of the existing production facilities has improved, orders for new machines also and many new projects are under discussion. I expect a robust rebound end of 2010 and in 2011” says Bruno Ameline the French Association’s President.

In China, for example, the government announced a series of measures. One of the projects concerns doubling the investment in rail networks. It will need millions of square meters of geotextiles which increasingly evolve in the direction of nonwovens solutions. French machinery manufacturers are very well positioned for such investments.

Bruno Ameline adds “our companies are well positioned for the future because  during the crisis, we have continued to invest in R&D in close relationship with our clients. We also have worked with machinery manufacturers offering complementary technologies to offer our customers a “single point of purchase”.

We have also worked very hard on energy savings. In many examples, the energy saving is in the 30-40% range, same or even more for the water consumption in dyeing and finishing.

For Evelyne Cholet, the Association Secretary General, “we cannot compete on high volume commodity products, Chinese and other Asian manufacturers offer low cost machines, but our strategy of specialized manufacturers with a tailor made approach is to address in depth customers’ needs. This is once again what our manufacturers will show at next ITMA ASIA+CITME and we cordially invite all interested textile producer to visit us and it will be an hour to receive them.”

NSC Nonwoven (Asselin-Thibeau) Hall E1 - Booth A04

NSC nonwoven supplies turnkey nonwoven lines for spunlacing, needlepunching and thermobonding. They are equipped with a supervisory control assistance system, which includes production recipes, maintenance and assistance to line management.

NSC nonwoven (Asselin-Thibeau) is well known for such nonwoven equipments as the Excelle® cards, crosslappers, IsoProdyn® weight distribution regulator, drafters, needlelooms, winders and slitters-rewinders.

To meet all nonwoven producers’ targets, the above NSC nonwoven machines are available in several level of performances. Thanks to the combination of Axcess and Excelle® equipment, NSC Nonwoven answers major customers’ expectations such as production lines adapted to local market size, cost reduction with faster production lines, lower average fabric weight, lower maintenance requirements and also customized products with in line combination of technologies.

PERFOJET Hall E1 - Booth A05

PERFOJET together with Andritz Küsters will present the latest innovations for spunlace and spunjet technologies. PERFOJET will exhibit some strategic parts of spunlace technology. These parts have been designed by PERFOJET and bring customer benefits for spunlace process like energy savings.

The main part of the hydroentanglement process is called injector. PERFOJET’s injector is fitted out with filtering cartridge to ensure final filtration of process water just before the strip, and EXH strip which provide a perfect quality of needles water. Spunlace producers have the opportunity to customize their final fabrics thanks to the patterning sleeves designed by PERFOJET. The producers can choose different patterning sleeves technologies, MP+® or MPP.

One of PERFOJET's successes is JETlace® 3000, capable of producing excellent spunlace fabrics from 30 to 500 gsm and with capacities of up to 25000 tons per year.

JETlace®Avantage enables spunlace fabrics to be produced from 30 to 120gsm with capacities of up to 4000 tons per year. With the recent market introduction of JETlace®Essentiel, PERFOJET offers the perfect machine for the production of wipes. JETlace®Essentiel is ideally configured for lightweight fabrics from 30 to 80gsm and with capacities of up to 15000 tons per year.

PERFOJET brings a new milestone in nonwovens industry thanks to Spunjet technology. SPUNjet® fabrics marry the strength of spunbond and the softness of spunlace. The Spunjet process offers additional fabric properties with regard to softness, drape, tensile strength and isotropic MD:CD ratio.

LAROCHE Hall E1 - Booth A02

LAROCHE will display its new AIRFELT line, designed to produce insulation felts and includes fiber opening and blending, web forming, steam oven and/or thermobonding oven, cutting, slitting and packaging. Felts can be resin bonded or bonded with low melt fibers, semicured or fully cured, addressing all the needs of the automotive and appliance industries as well as the furniture industries. LAROCHE staff will be available to present its new “Flexiloft+” Airlay line with extended weight range.

RITM Hall W2 - Booth D22

RITM is one of a leading companies in Industrial yarn preparation. Since 2006, RITM has brought to the market key innovations in the Industrial yarn preparation field. After the introduction (during RIETER era) of the revolutionary UT50 (Universal TFO twister) with fully electronic and individual positions; of the UTC60 (Universal TFO twister and direct Cabler), equally with fully electronic and individual positions as well as product quality monitoring and production tracking with RFID tags. Latest the UTW30 & 40 (Universal TFO twister and Winder) allowing very flexible production of 3 ply cords, again with fully electronic driven spindles.

With this family of machines available, RITM is covering most of the needs of all converters involved in industrial yarn preparation being in the automotive sector. RITM machines are combining, flexibility for production, energy savings, manpower reduction, high outputs, ease of use, highest product quality, especially with touchy yarns such as aramids or similar.

SUPERBA Hall W2 -
Booth A09

SUPERBA offers solutions for quality manufacturing of carpet yarn with environment friendly machines. The SUPERBA Group distributes textile machines throughout the USA, China, Turkey, Middle East, and Europe. SUPERBA has established “SSRO” in 2005, a sister company located in Shanghaï, in order to offer Chinese customers better proximity and services for spare-parts, line maintenance and installation, as well as employee training with Chinese speaking technicians.

With more than 1400 lines installed throughout the world, SUPERBA is the global leader in this field of activity with a market share of more than 60%. The turnover is mainly achieved with the heat setting machines. This heat treatment with steam under pressure provides a very soft touch, a perfect dyestuff setting and an increased resistance to wear as well as the famous ‘pin point’ effect on synthetic and natural fibers used in the carpet...all the characteristics of top quality carpet.

SUPERBA will show their TVP3, latest heat setting line generation. The TVP3 line has seen its energy consumption cut almost in half compared to the machines of 1995 for equivalent production levels. It is the most energy efficient and environment friendly heat setting machine on the market.

Furthermore several customers who had already bought a first TVP3 line are now extending their production capacity by buying additional machines of this latest generation SUPERBA. This completes their range of machines with dyeing lines, winders with automatic doffing in addition to small steaming and shrinking machines for machine-knitting yarn and handknitting yarns.

FIL CONTROL Hall W2 - Booth B60

FIL CONTROL will show a large range of products with yarn cutters, sensors with different technologies (Optical, Capacitive, Piezo-electric) and Quality control devices.

FIL CONTROL France and FIL CONTROL Co. Ltd (Subsidiary in China) can offer its customers solutions and functions as follows:

• Simple and multi end detection of any kind of yarns.
• Protection machine elements when yarn breaking through a yarn cutter.
• Controlling of length, tension, diameter.

A new version of MDL-B (Electronic length meter) has been enhanced to measure a various kinds technical fibres, on different types of winders produced and installed on the market (manual, half manual and automatic ones). With MDL-B, length accuracy are 0.5 to 1%. FIL CONTROL can be considered as both an equipment manufacturer as well as a function supplier for its customers worldwide.

PETIT Hall W2 - Booth D20

Founded in 1946, PETIT expertise presently covers four majors activities:

• Trading in spare parts for milling machines, two for one and texturizing.
• Maintenance in factories of worn machine parts (spindles, rollers, weft feeders, nozzles).
• Manufacture of their models of spindles.
• Design expertise in collaboration with customers of special parts for fitting to PETIT machines.

The new activity of the manufacture of spindles commenced in 1990 and so far  70,000 Hollow covering spindles for average speed and 50,000 new generation rapid covering spindles from 8,000 to 28,000 rpm have already been delivered In June 2009, PETIT acquired worldwide exclusive rights to deal in original spare parts for the ‘’fine yarn’’ machines of the ARCT, ACBF, ICBT and RITM brands.

Recently, two engineers from ICBT have joined PETIT, who travel all over the world to move or transfer the FT machine, fix a breakdown, modify or to carry out improvements to their customers’ machines.

AESA Hall W2 - Booth A06

The company is specialized in air-conditioning and waste collection systems for textile factories. The overall energy saving is becoming a competitiveness factor. The AESA air conditioning plants are contributing in a big way to this goal.

For spinning factories, the company offers state of the art machines and drive all fans and pumps motors through inverters. For weaving, the latest development  WEAVE DIRECT is able to offer upto 50% energy savings. This is possible due to a dedicated air ducting system, where unique and localized WDB type diffusers are placed above each loom. Therefore, moisture needed for a good output is conveyed in the right quantity to the right place above the loom, and the overall air requirement can be reduced drastically.

Last but not least, the DIGIVENT control system, with latest AESA logic offers more stable room conditions between running and not running high speed machines. These achievement are possible due to more than 50 years of experience in this specialized field and is assuring better productivity to AESA’s clients and better yarn and fabric quality to the end user.

STÄUBLI Hall E4 - Booth C01

STÄUBLI will be present its latest technologies in Jacquard weaving on two completely productive weaving machines running on the booth. To have a detailed look at the working Jacquard units a direct access from the second floor of the two storey booth building to the gantry shall be made possible.

Other electronic Jacquard machines are presented on the ground floor as demonstration units will give an impression about their wide range of application in most fabric types. The exposures of electronic dobbies and cam motions to be used on any type of weaving machine and weft insertion principle, for low or high mounting, complete the picture of the STÄUBLI shedding systems.

STÄUBLI’s Weaving Preparation Division will present an automatic drawing-in machine, warp tying machines and a multi-layer warp leasing machine for wide warps including colour detection. That range of products points out the ever increasing importance of automation also in the production stages before weaving.

New carpet samples produced on the carpet weaving machine ALPHA 400 by STÄUBLI Group member Schönherr can be seen on one side of the booth. The ever increasing variety of patterns impresses creative designers and proves the flexibility of the Schönherr equipment.

The STÄUBLI booth will be completed by Group member DEIMO that presents its state-of-the art electronic control solutions for various textile machines, and that come into use in STÄUBLI Jacquard machines as well.

CALEMARD Hall W4 – Booth A13

Calemard is the global reference in quality slitting rewinding and spooling flexible solutions. Calemard has focused its activities on highly technical cutting applications and gained strong market position in the areas of conventional textiles, technical textiles and nonwovens, in particular when the market demands and material request entails the high quality slitting and/or rewinding solutions. Calemard has a proven expertise in crush, shear, razor and also in sealing/cutting technologies. For conventional and standard machines in textile market, Calemard machines are performing on different applications like sun protection, labels, interlining, ribbons, flags, etc.

Nowadays, Technical Textiles are becoming one of the main converting applications for Calemard machinery, and application are typically based on filtration fabrics, conveying belts, dipped fabrics, rubberized fabrics, automotives, etc. It is also interesting to note that originally focused on narrow web slitting, Calemard has expanded its knowledge in spooling technology.

Calemard has been present for more than ten years in the hygiene business, with high performance and very sensitive equipment to handle this delicate material. Calemard also provided wide slitters to process bulky and/or fragile large rolls. The development of new products has pushed new developments of higher capacity slitter or very specialized one for ‘niche’ markets Calemard supplied a lot of equipment to commission slitter companies to process various nonwoven material   for roofing, filtration, garments, flooring, automotive, medical applications.

DECOUP+ Hall W4 - Booth A14

Decoup+ is a specialist of continuous ultrasonic cutting and sealing Decoup+ is developing and manufacturing standard or turnkey continuous ultrasonic cutting and welding systems for textile & nonwovens applications.

For cutting on looms Decoup+ proposes compact and easy to install devices, producing stable and consistent edges, whilst maintaining fabric properties. It also avoids certain drawbacks of hot cutting of materials.

For the high quality demanding market of technical textiles, Decoup+ offers accurate devices to cut and/or seal edges on stenters and inspection machines. Decoup+  has also developed an ultrasonic forging solution to reinforce fabric edges.

Decoup+  has also a strong experience in splicing benches. Installed at the exit of nonwovens production lines, splicing benches are used to join two bobbins together or to eliminate defects during control processes. The ultrasonic splicing technology performs strong join without overthickness while maintaining the original properties of the product, and so, eliminates the risk during finishing operations, to stop the lines to scrap the neck and overthickness resulting from a hot wire splicing.

Decoup+  proposes a range of equipment for final make-up operations: The autonomous workstation to perform high quality cutting, sealing or welding operations, with only tool changes, and handheld cutters for straight or profile cutting adapted to multi-purposed operations. The devices are specifically adapted to continuous operations. These solutions are proposed as modular units to be mounted on existing lines, as adapted benches or as handheld units.

DOLLFUS & MULLER Hall W5 - Booth B02

Established in 1811, this French company is a key spare parts manufacturer for textile finishing. During the exhibition, DOLLFUS & MULLER will introduce a new high performance compacting felt for knitted fabrics finishing. The new compacting felt design has been studied in order to obtain the best performances from the compacting machine and the longest possible life from the felt. The felt surface is much smoother in order to be used with the more delicate open width knitted fabrics with Lycra for instance.

Additionally DOLLFUS&MULLER is a leader in Palmer felts for sanforizing machines and printing dryer belts. DOLLFUS & MULLER will show during the exhibition the widest range of open mesh dryer conveyor belts to be used with the more severe and specific working conditions.