Toyota Industries Corp., Japan — manufacturer of textile machinery, automobiles, material handling equipment, electronics and logistics solutions — and textile machinery manufacturer Trützschler GmbH & Co. KG, Germany, have announced a cooperation to develop, manufacture and market combing machines. The companies introduced the first jointly developed product, a prototype Toyota-Trützschler TCO 12 combing machine, last month at ITMA Asia + CITME 2012 in Shanghai.

The new comber features Toyota's servo motor technology using individual motors to synchronize operation of the combing element drives on both sides of the machine, thereby minimizing torsion of the elements as well as machine vibration. The companies report the comber produces sliver of improved quality owing to considerably reduced combing condition variance of the eight comb heads.


The TCO 12 also features a new head stock with draw box and can changer designed by Trützschler based on the company's know-how from building draw frames with individual drives and featuring highly dynamic leveling. It also features Trützschler's Disc Monitor draw frame quality sensor, which provides data to enable the machine's automatic self-optimization, and continually monitors sliver count and corrects lap weight deviations as necessary.

July/August 2012