From the Sector

Members of TMAS – the Swedish textile machinery association – are providing crucial manufacturing and automation services to the filtration sector, which is an often invisible but very significant part of the global textile industry.

Technical woven and nonwoven fabrics are used in a wide variety of products in filtration systems for air, gas and liquid filtration, touching on almost every facet of life in the 21st Century.

They are crucial to aerospace and road transportation and a vast range of industrial processes and also to be found in every home, hotel and institutional building in air conditioning systems and household appliances such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners.

At its Skjåk manufacturing plant in Norway, for example, Interfil manufactures an annual 230,000 air filter units from a staggering range of some 15,000 variants, with 9,000 products moving continuously through the differing stages of the plant at any time each day, and a daily finished output of 1,100 products.

It’s a similar situation at the US plant of Filtration System Products (FSP) in Farmington, St Louis, which now has a daily production of over 2,200 filter hoses and media.

Both Interfil and FSP rely on the automated material handling expertise of TMAS member Eton Systems.

Eton’s individually addressable product carriers are designed to eliminate manual transportation and minimise handling throughout a manufacturing plant, ensuring each individual product arrives at its correct position precisely when required for each separate process step.

Interfil has relied on Eton automation since 2014, when a 50-metre overhead conveyor system was designed and installed to link the company’s two production halls at the Skjåk plant, eliminating the need for manual handling and truck transport between the facilities. This has resolved the challenge of having semi-finished products made far from the final assembly area, not only improving efficiency, quality control and component traceability across all parts of production, but also increasing on-site safety due to the need for fewer trucks.

FSP has meanwhile calculated that since installing an Eton system in 2023, it has increased its production output by 60% using the same number of operators and the same working hours as with the previous manual system. Eton’s inbuilt quality system also ensures that only 100% perfect products are unloaded from the system, allowing for a much more efficient quality control process. In addition, Eton’s compact method of moving single units through the production process has saved floor space and created a safer and more ergonomic work environment.

23 Italian textile machinery manufacturers will partecipate at the upcoming Colombiatex, the main Colombian textile fair, which will take place in Medellín from January 28 to 30, 2025, once again confirming the strong connection between local textile companies and Italian suppliers of textile technology.

Despite a decrease in demand for textile machinery from the Colombian textile sector during the first nine months of 2024, the Country remains one of the main markets in the area for textile machinery manufacturers. Specifically, in 2023, Italy was the second largest technology supplier behind China, with an export value of around 13 million euros. In the first nine months of 2024, Italian sales in Colombia reached 8 million euros.

“The Colombian textile and clothing industry has experienced strong growth in recent years, also supported by a technological upgrade in which Italian machinery has often played a key role,” comments Marco Salvadè, President of ACIMIT. “For many of Italian manufacturers Colombiatex remains an unmissable event in the international trade fair calendar to strengthen partnership with Colombian textile companies”.

In the Italian pavilion organized by Italian Trade Agency and ACIMIT, the Association of Italian Textile Machinery Manufacturers, among the 23 exhibitors, the following ACIMIT member companies will also be present: Biancalani, Btsr, Color Service, Danti, Dettin, Fadis, Flainox, Isotex, Itema, Kairos Engineering, Lonati, Mcs, Mts, Monti-Mac, Ratti, Reggiani Macchine, Salvadè, Santoni, Stalam, Tecnorama, Tonello, Triveneta.