Finally, Zaber Spinning Mills Ltd. has successfully developed cotton-jute blended yarn in their factory which has been used to make a fabric suitable for manufacturing home textile products. This development is the output of a project of the Textile Talent Hunt 7th Season organized by Textile Today. Textile Today partnered with Zaber Spinning Mills Ltd. and teamed up with a transformation leader, a technical expert, an industry supervisor, and an academic supervisor. After that, the project has been placed among the top 5 selected projects of the competition.
The team worked extensively to develop the cotton-jute blended yarn with conventional technologies of the factory. The processes of combining these two types of fibres were not easy. As the cotton and jute have distinct properties in terms of softness, micronaire value, and dye uptake, blending these two fibres required various mechanical and chemical processes.
This blended yarn can be used to make value-added home textile products for export that are conventionally made from hemp or flax fibres.
“As the jute fibre has a similar property to linen, and the blended yarn shows good lustre and dye take up a property, it can be used to make value-added products as made with linen,” Enamul Karim, Executive Director, Spinning Operation, Noman Group thinks. Sourcing good quality jute fibre from good plants is also a big challenge according to him.
There are many products in the market which are made of cotton-hemp, cotton-flax, or cotton-linen blended yarns. But jute-cotton blended yarns are not that much available in the market. As jute is extensively produced in our country, successful commercial production of jute-cotton blended products can help us make more value-added products like home textiles.
“As we have commercially developed sample fabrics from jute-cotton blended yarn, hope it will not be difficult for us to develop these products in bulk scale,” Engr. Mohammad Shadekul Islam the technical expert of this project said Textile Today.
To make the jute fibre soft to be suitable for blending with cotton, it was taken through a softening process. In this project, the factory had developed a 70/30 and 80/20 ratio of cotton and jute fibres to make different combinations of yarns. Maintaining the quality parameters of these sample blended yarns was a difficult job for the team as it had to be done in a manual process.
“The difficulties during these processes can be easily overcome in case of bulk production of the yarn through during sample production there were many challenges like fibre jamming, maintaining machine parameters, yarn breakage etc,” A.K.M Mazed, GM, Zaber Spinning Mills Ltd said.
Tanvir Hossain, the transformation leader of this project has secured his position among the top 5 of the Textile Talent Hunt 7th Session through the successful completion of this project.
The transformation leaders in this competition were selected from several Campus Day Competitions (CDC) organized across the country. In the CDC the students went through a rigorous assessment and the competent ones were selected as the transformation leaders who went through a set of exclusive training programs to enrich themselves.
Tanvir Hossain was curious about jute from the beginning as a student of yarn engineering at the Bangladesh University of Textiles (BUTEX). He put a tremendous effort to bring a successful output from this project by finding out issues that hinder the commercial production of jute-cotton blended yarns and solving them.
“We had to change the setup of carding machine to make it compatible for the jute-cotton blend as the previous setup was suitable for cotton fibres only,” Tanvir Hossain said to textile today when sharing his journey to accomplish this project.
