An Economic-Engineering Assessment of a Hypothetical Tuft-to-Yarn Textile Mill

An economic-engineering simulation model has been developed for a hypothetical textile mill operating an integrated, continuous-flow, tuft-to-yarn (TY) system. The model was used to calculate costs of producing cotton denim yarns with two different TY configuration mills. These were compared with a similar model for a conventional open-end (OE) textile mill processing the same product at similar production rates. The models predict that the TY mills will reduce production costs by between 4.11 and 6.2 cents per pound of spun yarn which amounts to a reduction of between 18.5 and 28 percent as compared with the conventional OE mill. Considering the raw materials’ cost as constant for all the models this processing cost reduction represents a total cost savings for the TY mills of between 4.8 and 7.3 percent of the total manufactured yarn costs.