Karl Brockmanns
Until May 1997, Dr. Ing. Karl Brockmanns was the Head of R&D at German spinning machine manufacturer Schlafhorst AG. He recently sold his firm Holthausen Maschinenbau which manufactures specialised textile machines. A particularly success over the past few years has been supplying the Chinese market.
"It is well known to all machine builders that the spinning mills, particularly in America, would welcome a new commercially competitive method of spinning soft-handle yarns. If Rotor spinning was invented now, it wouldn't catch on like it did. If denim jeans ever went out of fashion; so would rotor spinning."
"Neither Rotor, nor Jet, nor Vortex technologies can make much inroad into the yarn market currently dominated by the 150 year old Ring spinning. Roller-Air (a modern derivative of Friction spinning) can be the answer. I know from my own R&D experience that this kind of technology is capable of eventually spinning fine cotton yarns at 1,000 metres per minute."
"When I was at Schlafhorst we spent many years researching a friction technology, but drastic downsizing and cost-cutting meant that R&D expenditure dried up. So I left to run my own textile engineering business. I believe it is an ideal concept to integrate the new Roller-Air spinning box into an existing OE-Rotor Spinning Machine."
"Today the use of individual drive motors is both technically and cost wise in a much better stage of development than 5 years ago. To use the 24 spindle Schlafhorst Autocoro machine in Bolton University as the base is an excellent way to get as fast as possible a comment of the market and attract retrofitting orders from the world's spinning mills. Only a machine or process which can be demonstrated in reality will find its real worth and acknowledgement."
