Air jet spinning first appeared for production use in the early '80s.
It has continued to grow in popularity,
especially for cotton and polyester blend yarns.
The largest end use market up to this point has been for sheeting and print cloth.
Recent advancements in the latest generation
of machines have made this high production
system more forgiving to shorter fiber length and thus to cotton use.
This has broadened the technology's versatility and
appeal to more end-use possibilities.
This spinning system uses sliver as its input,
thereby taking advantage of the cost-savings afforded by
deleting the roving step required by ring spinning.
Much like rotor spinning,
it also produces a wound package that is
ready for subsequent use in weaving or knitting.
This negates the need for a separate winding step.
The air jet machine uses roller drafting as the
means for reducing linear mass in the fed sliver.
The drafting system is not unlike the drafting
configuration found on the ring spinning system.
After exiting the front pair of drafting rolls,
the fiber is pulled into an orifice by a suction airflow
created by the vortex that will perform the twist insertion.
As the fiber enters the vortex zone,
it is literally spun into a yarn structure by the whirling air currents.
Like rotor spinning,
there is some degree of random fiber entanglement that is also involved.
This is the main reason for the somewhat lower yarn strengths
of air jet yarns when compared to their ring-spun counterparts.
Just as in rotor spinning,
this process is highly automated with automatic piecing of broken
ends and automatic doffing, or removal, of full yarn packages.