Canmartex and the Eurecat technology centre are pioneering a new generation of circular knitting machines, eco-designed to reduce their carbon footprint and automated to optimise efficiency and operator ergonomics in their use, as part of the ECO-TEX project.

“The main goal is to help modernise and upgrade the textile industry to make it more competitive,” says Enric Marti, CEO and co-owner of Canmartex.

“We are going to innovate in new materials and structures to redesign textile machinery to make it more sustainable and mitigate its environmental impact in the manufacturing process and at the end of its service life,” adds Francisco José Fernández, project manager in the Product Innovation and Multiphysics Simulation Unit. “This will also involve lightening its weight and partnering with local manufacturers and suppliers.”

Furthermore, “we will digitalise and automate processes such as the automatic positioning of machine needles to ramp up productivity and efficiency in businesses while also optimising ergonomics to make it easier for operators to perform supervision and quality control tasks and adjust the knitting machines,” notes Adrián Mora, principal researcher in the Machine Line of the Advanced Manufacturing Systems Unit at Eurecat. “This job calls for considerable concentration and skill and can take between 4 and 10 hours due to the large number of needles they have.”

Another component of the project is sensorising critical points to conduct predictive maintenance of the machines, oversee industrial processes and deliver defect-free manufacturing.

The project has a budget of more than €600,000, will run for three years and is funded by the call for “Public-Private Partnership Projects under the National Plan for Scientific, Technical and Innovation Research 2021-2023 as part of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan”.