ADVANCING SPUNBOND TECHNOLOGY THE ULTIMATE WAY

Fumin Lu Director R&D Ason Engineering Inc. Engineering Inc. Fort Lauderdale. FL 33301 Anders Moller President Ason Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301

TECHNICAL REVIEW AND ANALYSIS

It is well known that the melt spinning technique, which was developed and commercialized for man-made fiber production by DuPont in the early 1930s, was adopted into the spunbond technology, not surprisingly by the same company, DuPont, thirty years later. Therefore it has been seen that the spunbond technology bears many similarities to the fiber producing process. The primary difference between the two begins with the filament drawing mechanism. Rather than mechanical take-up rolls used in the fiber producing process, the air drawing device, which creates pressure difference for providing the force to attenuate filaments, is used in the spunbonding process. Based on the pressure of the air used, the spunbond processes can also be grouped into three and the categories--the high pressure, the low pressure underpressure processes, respectively. Figures I and 2 are flow diagrams of those three categories. As we mentioned before, a large amount of research work has been done in the past to advance the spunbond technology. On one hand, it is common knowledge that great accomplishments have already been achieved in the field of raw materials, better performance machinery, new products and product applications. All of those technological advancement have significantly contributed to the progressing of the spunbond technology. On the other hand, however, a careful analysis of spunbond technologies reveals that there has not been a signiftcant improvement made in the melt spinning technique that are currently used in spunbonding processes as shown in Fig. 1 and 2 and the filament spinning speed for the current melt spinning technique in spunbond processes is in the range of 2,000 to 3,000 m/min only. It becomes apparent that this spinning speed is the bottleneck of the spunbond production. Therefore the ultimate way to advance the spunbond technology will lie in the degree to which the innovation of the melt spinning technique can be made

ABSTRACT

It is well known that the filament spinning speed in the current spunbonding processes is generally in the range of 2,000 to 3,000 m/min despite of numerous efforts that have been made to improve it in the past three decades. A careful analysis and comparison of the spunbond technology with melt blowing technique has clearly led to the realization that the current melt spinning technique in the spunbonding process has to be thoroughly innovated before it can significantly break the barrier of the filament spinning speed. As a result, Ason spunbond technology featuring a compact line with a balanced quench system was developed and patented. Filament spinning speed of 6,000 m/min or higher can be reached by the Ason process and results showing many other advantages of the technology are reported.

INTRODUCTION
The spunbond technology among other nonwoven technologies has shown an outstanding record in terms of the annual growth rate, the production volume and the expansion of product end-uses for the past three decades due largely to its advantageous capability of producing wide variety of products at high production and low cost. It is, therefore, not surprising that a tremendous amount of interest as well as effort from both the industry and the academy alike with respect to the developmental work and the investment of the technology has long been observed, resulting in hundreds of patents and know-hows being generated annually on processes, products and equipments, and a number of new spunbond technologies also being brought up in recent years. It is reasonable to say that the spunbond technology as a whole has made an impressive stride in technical advances since its inception thirty years ago. Needless to say, at this point further advancing the technology will not be an easy task and requires a careful study to make sure that we understand where we are today and which direction needs to be taken to accomplish the task. The present paper provides a brief review and analysis of the current spunbond technology based on a comparison with the melt blowing technique, therefore the problem or the bottleneck of the spunbond process can be identified and attacked. The result is the Ason spunbond technology. Comparison between the new technology and current spunbond technologies in terms of production capacity vs. filament sizes, production cost and investment need are reported. Unfortunately, we at this moment are unable to reveal any details of our technology.

Spunbonding vs. Melt Blowing.

Figure 3 shows a flow diagram of melt blowing process. It is obvious from comparison of Fig. I, 2 with 3 that spunbonding and melt blowing are two substantially different processes, even though they belong to the same category of the melt spinning technique. The major differences between the two processes are listed in Table I

1996 Nonwovens Conference 51