Cloth Standby Buffering for Stable Automatic Cloth Feeding
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Solution Overview
Problem
In automatic cloth feeding processes, maintaining a stable supply of cloth to the straightening unit is challenging due to delays, which reduce production volume and are difficult to recover from, as existing devices lack the capacity to accumulate sufficient cloth pieces without causing congestion.
Innovation Solution
A buffering device with a cloth standby section that can be arranged before or after the feeding conveyor, utilizing a cloth supply section with clamps that move upward to hold cloth at the central portion, allowing for temporary accumulation and buffering, and incorporating a straightening unit to manage cloth ends, ensuring regular flow and increased accumulation capacity.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If the number of cloth pieces accumulated from the feeding station to the straightening unit is increased, then the supply stability is improved, but the device complexity increases due to lack of space in existing devices
Solution Approach 1:
The feeding system is divided into two independent feeding stations, each capable of feeding cloth pieces separately. This segmentation allows the system to accumulate cloth from multiple sources without requiring a large single accumulation space, thereby improving supply stability while avoiding excessive device complexity in a single unit.
Solution Approach 2:
The invention utilizes the time dimension by implementing a buffering device that temporarily stores cloth pieces before they reach the straightening unit. This temporal buffering allows the system to decouple the feeding rate from the processing rate, enabling accumulation without proportionally increasing spatial complexity.
2Productivity
If a two-station feeding process is adopted to increase production volume, then the maximum capacity of the straightening unit is utilized, but feeding balance is lost and feeding delays occur
Solution Approach 1:
The buffering device incorporates a detection mechanism that monitors the number of accumulated cloth pieces and provides feedback to control the feeding process. When the buffer reaches its capacity, the system automatically adjusts the feeding rate to prevent overflow, maintaining feeding balance while maximizing production volume through the two-station process.
3Quantity of substance
If cloth is accumulated in existing devices, then the accumulation capacity is limited, but increasing the number of cloth pieces leads to congestion in the automatic cloth feeder
Solution Approach 1:
The buffering device extracts the accumulation function from the main feeding pathway, creating a separate storage area for cloth pieces. This separation allows cloth pieces to be accumulated without occupying the feeding conveyor space, thereby increasing the number of stored pieces while preventing congestion in the automatic cloth feeder.
4Reliability
If the cloth standby section is arranged before the feeding conveyor, then the cloth can be buffered before feeding, but the space utilization is reduced
Solution Approach 1:
The buffer capacity is designed to be adjustable, allowing the system to dynamically adapt the accumulation space based on production requirements. This dynamic configuration enables the cloth standby section to provide stable feeding when needed while minimizing space occupation when accumulation is not required, optimizing both feeding stability and space utilization.
Data Source
AI summary
A buffering device in an automatic cloth feeder that includes a cloth standby section which accumulates the cloth. There is provided a cloth supply section 11 that can supply a quantity of cloth exceeding a processing quantity of feeding so as to proceed with feeding in an automatic cloth feeder without congestion in the automatic cloth feeder performing a process in which the cloth is introduced to a feeding conveyor at a substantially central portion in a carrying direction, right and left trailing end portions are altered by crumpling the cloth from the right and left sides, the cloth is held in a deposition section, and the cloth is fed into a process. A cloth standby section 14 in which the cloth to be carried stands by temporarily is set at a preceding stage of a feeding conveyor 20 or at a following stage thereof.