Effects of Clothes Washer Spinning at High Revolutions on Water Removal and Textile Damage

摘要

The mechanical de-watering of textiles in the textile care processing by centrifugation shows extreme advantages compared to the energy and time intensive water removal by tumble-drying or ironing. Therefore a trend to higher spin speed can be observed in clothes washers. This is additionally supported by the European Energy Label for clothes washers. Spin speeds in the range of up to 1800 min~(-1) are standard in top range horizontal axis machines. The introduction of direct drive gives the opportunity of further increase of spin speed. The maximum spin speed is limited by the motor and machine construction. Extraction efficiency is limited, depending on the treated laundry, the sensibility of the textiles against mechanical action and by the extraction technology. The paper shows possible spinning efficiency by centrifugation based on a research project about the optimisation of hydro-mechanic extraction processing. This includes studies on the influence of drum speed, drum diameter, spinning duration, laundry distribution before final spin, load size and type of laundry on spin efficiency and textile damage. Textile damage is determined by visual assessment, measurement of TSL, air and water permeability of semi-permeable textiles of different textiles which are rinsed and extracted up to 100 times. In addition, a general discussion about theoretical spin efficiency values is given.