Spannrahmenmodernisierung bei Vlisco
Germany’s iNTERSPARE Textilmaschinen has upgraded a tenter frame from iNTERSPARE’s Artos product line for Dutch textile company Vlisco Group. On this occasion an old Artos counterflow dryer built in 1971 was exchanged for a new Artos 4 compartment Unistar tenter frame dryer in only 3 weeks. Vlisco Group is considered the market leader for manufacturing clothing fabrics for West and Central Africa. Founded in Helmond, The Netherlands, in 1846, the Vlisco Group and their fabrics have grown into an essential part of African culture, receiving widespread attention from the art, design and fashion worlds. Vlisco Group’s brand portfolio consists of 4 brands: Vlisco, Woodin, Uniwax and GTP. The company’s head office is located in Helmond as well as the design- and production facilities for the Vlisco brand. For the other brands these facilities are based in Ghana and Ivory Coast.
The good cooperation with the customer allowed for very detailed preliminary project planning, resulting in the new dryer being custom-fit inside the existing tenter frame system. By upgrading to Artos Unistar, The Vlisco brand in Helmond, The Netherlands, is now considerably benefiting from the cost savings of the Econ-Air energy saving system (Babcock Patent) and the powerful Star-Jet nozzles (Babcock Patent) of the new dryer combined with the old stenter.
iNTERSPARE Managing Director Dirk Polchow says: “Working with Vlisco couldn’t have been better. It was of course important to Vlisco to have the upgrade implemented as quickly as possible so the system could be used for production again. And for us the project was a good opportunity to again prove our special upgrading know-how with an innovative and excellently placed customer. As world market leader for waxed fabrics, Vlisco has very high standards for drying and finishing processes and we are delighted with the way we were able to overcome this challenge.”
The starting point for the upgrade is the modern iNTERSPARE database, which contains all Artos and Krantz installations from the past 70 years in digital form, which allows for the development of very efficient concepts and plans for upgrading to state of the art systems considering the individuality of the systems. There are 15232 existing systems from the Artos and Krantz product lines at textile companies in 116 countries. Virtually all of these systems, installed by Artos, Famatex, Haas, Krantz, Deutsche Babcock Textilmaschinen and Moenus over the past 50 years, are still used for drying and finishing textiles. Based on a growing need for productivity as well as sustainability, managing director Polchow sees a greatly increasing demand for new systems and upgrades in the near future.
He says: “Firstly, we consider how long Artos and Krantz systems can be used in production as an absolute mark of quality. If this was the case in the automotive industry, we would still see a lot of old VW beetles on the roads today. But it’s also clear that our modern systems once again offer a significant technological improvement, even if development here is not as spectacular as in cars. But things don’t always have to be new. Oftentimes an upgrade as was the case with Vlisco will suffice to implement 40 years of technological advances in less than 4 weeks whilst satisfying maximum standards in textiles.”
The iNTERSPARE Artos Unistar tenter frame is the top choice among textile finishers around the world due to its high efficiency. Its unbeatable advantage is that it efficiently distributes air across the entire width of the fabric. This achieves a perfectly even product quality with optimal preparation for the subsequent manufacturing processes.
The Econ-Air energy saving system greatly improves the airflow in the tenter frame and with only one central exhaust fan, leads to a further energy saving. This system uses upheated dry air until it carries the maximum amount of moisture before it will be extracted instead of exhausting the dry air in the first compartments of a dryer where it has nearly no moisture content.
Polchow on this: “Sustainability has always been an important issue at iNTERSPARE. Our modern machines contribute to sustainability because they save energy or ensure a reduced energy use related to productivity. As a member of the VDMA blue competence initiative we are always changing how we make our machines even more efficient. And even within our company we feel obliged to do more for sustainability. In the economic sense this means being a sustainably good partner to our employees, customers and suppliers. With respect to environmental protection we save energy with a company headquarters built as a passive house and utilise the roof of our assembly hall to generate solar power.“