Wet Spinning Trough Softening Physics and Linear Yarn Count Mechanics
Trough water at 70°C hydrolyzes middle lamella pectins to permit inter-fibre slippage, enabling high mechanical drafts down to fine linear yarn counts.
Shive Neps
Fibre Impurity
Small clusters of tangled fibres wrapped around woody fragments of the flax stem create localized thick spots that reduce yarn quality. These defects, termed shive neps, originate during the scutching and hackling stages when the woody core of the flax plant is not fully separated from the bast fibres. During the spinning process, these fragments catch on the drafting rollers, forming dense, irregular slubs in the yarn.
This causes structural weak points that are prone to breaking under the high tension of the weaving loom. Spinning mills must use optical yarn clearers on winding machines to detect and cut out these defects before the yarn is wound onto packages for export or weaving.
Spinning Trouble
Winding machines use high-speed sensors to identify and remove these defects from the yarn. When yarn clearers detect shive neps, they activate a cutting mechanism that removes the defective section, followed by an automatic splicing of the yarn ends. While this process improves yarn uniformity, it increases the number of splices, which can itself affect the performance of the yarn during high-speed knitting or weaving.
Quality Sorting
Fabric inspection protocols in weaving mills focus on identifying these blemishes in the finished cloth. Because shive neps resist dye penetration, they appear as pale or undyed spots that mar the appearance of the fabric. Mills must use manual or automated sorting to grade the finished fabric, with high concentrations of these defects reducing the yarn batch to a lower commercial grade.