Optimal Design of an Indian Carpet Weaving Loom Structure.pdfVIP

Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research, CSIR, India, V. 65, May, pp. 410--415. Optimal design of an Indian carpet weaving loom structure Himanshu Chaudhary* and Subir Kumar Saha Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Delhi, New Delhi 110 016 Received 29 July 2005; revised 10 February 2006; accepted Present looms to weave the carpets in India are made of wood, which are susceptible to termite attacks and low service life. Besides, the high tension in the warps is generated manually through the pull of a rope by 2-3 persons. In order to avoid the above difficulties, an improved metallic loom was developed at IIT Delhi in 2001, which made weaving easy but the cost of loom is high. In this paper, optimisation of the metallic loom is carried out resulting in relatively lightweight and reduced cost. The design is verified using the Finite Element Analysis software, ANSIS. Keywords: Carpet loom, Design, Optimization, Structure IPC Code: D03D39/00 Introduction Handloom weaving of carpets is different in many aspects from the handloom weaving of a fabric1. There is no better kind of the carpet than carpet made by hand; though this is far from implying that all hand-tufted carpets are superior to all machine-made ones2 . Traditionally, Indian or oriental carpets are woven on wooden looms, which are becoming economically, environmentally, and functionally non-viable due to the following reasons3,4 : i) Life is limited (5-8 years) due to susceptibility to termites and frequent investments are required; ii) Deforestation; iii) Laborious tensioning, as rope arrangement is used to generate high tension in the warps; and iv) Non-uniform tension in the warps over the time because the wooden beams gradually bends. The non-uniformity affects quali