Analysis of the characteristics of air–yarn coupling movement in the profiled reed groove of an air-jet loom

The movement characteristics of yarn in the profiled reed groove of an air-jet loom can have a great impact on the performance of the fabric. Unstable yarn movement tends to lead to weft defects, as short wefts or weft breaks may occur, which could deteriorate the quality of the final fabric. In this paper, the characteristics of the yarn movement in a profiled reed groove are numerically studied. The arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian method is used to solve the two-way airflow–yarn interaction and the yarn is simulated with the ball–socket model. A fluctuation ratio is defined to characterize the unsteadiness of the yarn movement. Our simulation first investigates the effect of the gap ratio of the profiled reed groove (β) on the yarn movement then compares the movements of different yarn kinds. The simulation results indicate that a larger β not only decreases gas leaks (thus saves gas consumption), but also stabilizes the yarn movement. Our simulation results also show that the movement of the yarn of polypropylene is more stable than the other two weft-yarn materials. An experiment is also conducted to validate our numerical results, which shows a favorable agreement between them. Our numerical results of the yarn movement in the profiled reed groove can provide a valuable insight into the optimization of the weft insertion system of the air-jet loom.