Trevor Rowe
Trevor Rowe BSc (Hons) is the Head of Textiles and Yarn Technology at Bolton University. He is a former Head of the Government trade body The North West Textile Network - NWTexNet.
"The further research & development needed to produce a retrofit spin-box based on the Mark 12 prototype, will enable a new way of commercialising the new Roller-Air technology. It certainly makes much more logical and economic sense than designing and building a new spinning machine. This can come later when bought-in fibre-opening and winding-head systems can cope with yarn delivery speeds over 250 metres per minute. That this is a technically feasible proposition is shown by Murata's Vortex machine which can spin short staple cotton yarns at 400 metres per minute, but whose yarns aren't best suited for fabricating textile products which require a soft-handle."
"The yarn market is still dominated by the labour and floor-space intensive Ring spinning and in today's yarn market there must be available a large number of Rotor spinning machines which are either for sale, or are mothballed by the mills. Even ignoring most of Eastern Europe and Africa there is a potential retrofit market of 4.5 million rotors."
"Working in collaboration with myself and other staff from Bolton University's previously named Bolton Textile Institute (click COLLABORATION to see the Yarn Testing Laboratory), Alan's earlier technology was originally targeted at the Swiss textile machinery giant Rieter and using about 70% of their rotor spinner's components. This was before the upgrading of the technology within a new spin-box to produce yarns with much more parallel fibres. With the advent of the Mark 10 prototype spin-box came the naming of the new technology as Roller-Air spinning. This has been further developed and the latest Roller-Air technology is incorporated inside the further advanced Mark 12 spin-box."
