The coating of knitted fabric opens new markets for a Portuguese textile company
Not far from the Portuguese / Spanish frontier, in Vila Nova de Cerveira is the domicile of the textile company TINTEX. Recently this company made an important step towards the future. The company owner and the technologists decided to tread new paths in the worldwide competition. Oriented towards the future Tintex sought the cooperation with the system supplier and stenter producer BRÜCKNER and together they worked out a unique solution to achieve completely new effects with knitted fabric. The test productions are taking place and TINTEX won already a prize with fabric produced on the new line.
The textile market on the Iberian Peninsula has become rather small in the last years. Therefore it is not amazing that TINTEX and BRÜCKNER attract the attention of the textile producers in both countries. TINTEX wants to keep up with future market developments and tries to get all available information about modern line design and new line know-how.
BRÜCKNER is recognized in the industry as world market leader in the finishing of extremely sensitive knitted fabric. And this BRUECKNER stenter offers undisputably unbeatable advantages particularly regarding the requirements to temperature uniformity in the treatment of synthetic fibre blends due to the counter principle and other constructive measures.
As innovative machine building company BRÜCKNER completes now these advantages with the possibility of coating and laminating this highly sensitive fabric. In BRÜCKNER’s Technology Center as well as on a BRÜCKNER line in the near Institute for Textile and Process Technology of the Technical University Stuttgart the customers can allow free play to their ideas and make tests.
Also TINTEX took this path and has been supported actively by BRÜCKNER. When discussing this step into the future, the companies could work out a new and revolutionary line concept.
The heart of the line is a stenter with the proven and patented BRÜCKNER „split-flow“ technology including the corresponding entry and exit components which are particularly designed for a low tension fabric transport and an extremely sensitive fabric surface.
In the entry and in the exit of the machine there are, however, two special features. The entry stand of the stenter integrates a newly developped special coating unit. It allows to apply stable and instable foams as well as pastes by means of a screen application unit. It takes only a few steps to change over to a knife-over-cylinder coating system.
In this process the upper draw roller is used as coating cylinder. This allows somewhat higher application weights for stable foam and pastes in case of more stable fabric.
The exit integrates a laminating/embossing calender offering also the possibility to provide with an electrical shortwave infra-red radiator a directly coated highly elastic knitted fabric with a shagreen by means of an embossing paper.
Currently the R&D department of Tintex develops very innovative coatings. In future Tintex wants to produce on the new BRÜCKNER line fabrics which could not be realized at all up to now or only by means of transfer coating.