Exclusive interview with Lin Jibao, Chairman of Xuyuan Textile: “From ‘Weaving’ to ‘Smart Manufacturing’—Boosting Quality and Efficiency in the Industry”

“In the first quarter, the company expects to achieve an output value of approximately 170 million yuan,” said Lin Jibao, Chairman of Fujian (Youxi) Xuyuan Textile Co., Ltd., as he inspected the 5G-enabled smart IoT-based spinning production workshop located in Chengnan Park, Youxi Economic Development Zone, on the 27th. Amidst the roar of machinery, Lin explained that the company is currently exploring new avenues for integrating digital technologies into the textile industry and building smart workshops. Once the high-quality blended yarn project is fully operational, the company’s production capacity will reach 400,000 spindles, with an annual output value of 1.8 billion yuan and tax contributions exceeding 60 million yuan.

For a long time, the textile industry has relied on relatively traditional production models, with processes such as winding yarn from roving frames being carried out manually—making it a labor-intensive industry. How to boost production efficiency and improve product quality has consistently been a pressing challenge that textile enterprises urgently need to solve.

As a key enterprise in Sanming City with annual revenues exceeding 10 billion yuan, Xuyuan Textile’s newly launched project boasts a total investment of 1.6 billion yuan. The first-phase project alone involves an investment of 690 million yuan and has built the largest single textile workshop in the province, measuring 381 meters in length and 86 meters in width. This workshop will have an annual production capacity of 170,000 spindles of high-quality blended yarn, generating an output value of 600 million yuan per year. By integrating an intelligent spinning production line equipped with a “Spinning MES Cloud System,” the company achieves online data collection, monitoring, operation, and forecasting across the entire production process, enabling it to operate as a “dark factory” capable of uninterrupted, 24-hour production.

In a corner of the workshop, several rows of combined-thickness, intelligent, fully automatic roving frames hum softly. On the overhead tracks, empty tubes are filled with yarn and then dispatched—yet not a single worker is in sight. This starkly contrasts with the bustling, crowded scenes typically seen in conventional spinning mills.

The combined coarse and fine yarn intelligent fully automatic roving frame employs automatic yarn changing and bobbin threading technologies. A yarn-changing robotic arm automatically exchanges full bobbins with empty ones; the empty bobbins are then automatically transferred to the yarn-releasing rack, preparing them for the next spinning cycle. The full bobbins are conveyed via the BTS intelligent roving transport system to an overhead three-dimensional yarn storage facility, where they are automatically delivered on demand to the spinning frames.

Between the spinning frame and the automatic winding machine, the combined spinning and winding unit enables automated material circulation from the spinning process to the winding process. Additionally, there is an intelligent packaging and logistics system for bobbins, which, through an automated bobbin conveying system, an automated bobbin stacking system, and other components, achieves fully unmanned operations across the entire process—including intelligent bobbin sorting by variety, online machine vision inspection, automatic stacking, and natural rehumidification.

“Alarm and operational提示 information from the workshop’s machinery can be pushed out instantly, significantly reducing employees’ unnecessary patrol time and cutting down operation response time by more than 80%,” said Lin Jibao. He added that digitalization in the workshop not only optimizes the production process but also lowers the error rate by 10%, boosts the yield of high-quality yarn by 20%, shortens the spinning cycle by 30%, and reduces labor requirements by more than 70%. Previously, it took 50 to 60 workers to handle 10,000 spindles; now, it takes just a single-digit number of workers.

(Source: Fujian Daily)