Artificial neural nets application in the cotton yarn industry

The competitiveness in the yarn production sector has led companies to search for solutions to attain quality yarn at a low cost. Today, the difference between them, and thus the sector, is in the raw material, meaning processed cotton and its characteristics. There are many types of cotton with different characteristics due to its production region, harvest, storage and transportation. Yarn industries work with cotton mixtures, which makes it difficult to determine the quality of the yarn produced from the characteristics of the processed fibers. This study uses data from a conventional spinning, from a raw material made of 100% cotton, and presents a solution with artificial neural nets that determine the thread quality information, using the fibers’ characteristics values and settings of some process adjustments. In this solution a neural net of the type MultiLayer Perceptron with 11 entry neurons (8 characteristics of the fiber and 3 process adjustments), 7 output neurons (yarn quality) and two types of training, Back propagation and Conjugate gradient descent. The selection and organization of the production data of the yarn industry of the cocamar® indústria de fios company are described, to apply the artificial neural nets developed. In the application of neural nets to determine yarn quality, one concludes that, although the ideal precision of absolute values is lacking, the presented solution represents an excellent tool to define yarn quality variations when modifying the raw material composition. The developed system enables a simulation to define the raw material percentage mixture to be processed in the plant using the information from the stocked cotton packs, thus obtaining a mixture that maintains the stability of the entire productive process