Predictive Maintenance
Wire life is decided in the blowroom. Trash abrades the points; fibre barely touches them.
— kg
Cotton the clothing will still process
Throughput is a poor proxy for the thing that actually blunts wire, which is the abrasive mineral fraction of the trash rather than its total mass — a cotton with high sand content wears clothing far faster than the trash percentage alone suggests, and the exponent has to be fitted per growth and per supplier. Grinding is treated as recovering a fixed share of life each time, whereas in practice the first grind recovers most and later ones progressively less. Neps and nep removal efficiency are the operational signal that wire is finished, usually well before any kilogram count says so.
Carding Wire Grinding & Replacement Lifespan Predictor — free, with the formula and a worked example, at Textile School.