Modern material science is striding into textile mills in Tamil Nadu in a pilot that is changing the decades-old way cotton is spun into thin threads, a move entrepreneurs dub a significant advancement.
In the energy saver pilot in textile hubs of Coimbatore and Tiruppur, millers are replacing heavy plasticmade spindle tubes — which hold the cotton threads coming out of the core spinning machine — with 12-gram carbon tubes.
These lightweight tubes are sturdy, last eight years and offer investment payback in three years, meaning the rest of their lifetimes can be dedicated for pure energy savings of up to 8%.
In Tamil Nadu, textile mills depend purely on manufacturing efficiency to compete with those in Gujarat as low availability of raw material cotton forces them to cut corners on power use to survive in the global exports arena.
This power saver is another effort to improve profits after a good number of enterprises moved to LEDs a few months ago to cut lighting costs. The spindle is the capacity metric for textiles just as tonnes are for cement production and the main power consuming area in a textile mill.
Considering that the watts saved is directly from the spindle, textile mill owners say it has potential to revolutionise production. “Earlier it was plastic tubes. Several materials were tried out, but the speed of spinning is over 23,000 revolutions per minute. This requires the tube to be very light but robust. Carbon fits the bill,” said Prabhu Damodharan, secretary of Indian Texpreneurs Federation, a south-side band of textile entrepreneurs.
For an average textile mill with a capacity of 50,000 spindles, the move can help cut power costs by Rs 50 lakh a year. With a majority of Indian textile businesses in the small and medium segment, this is a sizable amount off the expenses column of their balance sheets.
For the pilot, over one lakh carbon tubes have been purchased so far. As per industry representatives there is potential to save Rs 75 crore a year in power costs if 50-lakh spindles of the 2.25-crore capacity in Tamil Nadu make the transition.
Carbon tubes have already made their entry in aviation, race cars and the sports industry, areas where cutting weight of objects to aid mobility is paramount.
“Carbon composites are made by a few suppliers in the world and its potential is just waiting to be tapped,” said Atul Guglani, director at Mantex Technologies, which is supplying the tubes to Coimbatore mills now.
It has taken nearly three years for the idea to get commercialised. Guglani said his company will foray into medical technologies next to see if weights of external aids in the human body can be cut. “The idea is simple: a 10-gram tube can withstand weight of 200 kg,” he said.
