BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates to a process and the relative plant for making wadding from recycled padded textile products.

The field of the present invention is that of the recovery of fibers coming from garments destined for disposal.

Currently this type of recovery is carried out by manually selecting the various parts that make up the garment, i.e. the internal and external fabrics, padding and other. Each single component is then cut separately into small parts, which in turn are subsequently processed with traditional Garnett machines.

The fibrous material, obtained through the described selection of the different materials that make up the garment to be recycled, is however very compact and not very bulky, therefore unsuitable for the formation of wadding that can be used as a padding material for clothes and for furniture in general.

The traditional method described above also has the drawback of requiring expensive and lengthy manual separation of the various materials to be treated and mechanical processing, which involve a considerable effort in terms of time and electricity.

CN 208 917 366 U, CN 104 120 510 A and US 4 241 474 A describe plants for opening or defibering unpadded garments, in which only rotating cylinders are used. The plant disclosed by CN 108 060 474 A, on the other hand, performs the simple cutting of an unpadded fabric, by means of rotating blades.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The main object of the present invention is to provide a process and a plant for the recovery, in a single operation, of padded textile products that are recycled or result from surplus production, which, unlike traditional methods of the same type, allow wadding to be obtained that can be used as padding in general in the clothing and furnishing sectors.

A further object of the invention is to provide a process and a plant of the type described above with which, in simple, quick operations and without manual interventions, insulating fiber or wadding flocks can be made, starting from a padded textile product recovered or resulting from surplus production.

These and other objects are achieved with the process and plant of claims 1 and 4, respectively. Preferred embodiments will be apparent from the remaining claims.

Compared with the known embodiments of the sector, the process and plant of the invention, in an economical, rapid and entirely mechanized way, allow wadding or fiber flocks to be produced that can be used as insulating padding in the clothing and furnishing sectors.

The process and plant of the invention also have the advantage of allowing the processing of more than 200 padded garments per hour of production, with an hourly throughput of 150 - 200 kg/h of wadding from padded garments weighing approximately 1 kg.

This plant, which creates a sustainable circular economy, is highly compact and space-saving (about 5 m x 2 m x 1 .5 m) but could be larger and consequently more productive.

Note that 2 kg of oil are needed to produce 1 kg of fiber; therefore, with an hourly production of 200 kg of wadding, the process and plant of the invention offer the advantage of saving about 400 kg of oil (8,000 kg of oil per day of production). In this way, a significant and substantial reduction of pollutants is obtained due to the non-use of raw material (oil) and all the consequent operations such as transport, mechanical processing of the starting textile fibers and more besides. The energy consumption required by the process and plant of the invention is in fact very low (about 10/12 kW/h); furthermore, in the complete absence of water consumption and any form of pollution, the invention can fully be placed in the context of a sustainable circular economy.

The process of the invention also allows traces of fragments of the recovered starting fabric to be left on the wadding thus made, demonstrating its origin from recovery processing of recycled materials. A certificate will be issued as a guarantee that the original material (manufactured or miscellaneous cuttings) has been cleaned and sanitized by UV radiation, with an ozone current or the like.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

These and other objects, advantages and features will be apparent from the following description of a preferred embodiment of the process and plant according to the invention illustrated by way of non-limiting example in the figures in the attached drawing sheets.

In these:

- Figure 1 is a plan view of a schematic embodiment of the plant of the invention;

- Figures 2 and 3 show, in side view, a pair of the rotating plates and a pair of the double cylinders, respectively, used on the plant of Figure 1 ;

- Figure 4 is a side view of a carding willow used on the plates of Figure 2; and

- Figure 5 shows a section of the cylinders of the station 13 of the plant of Figure 1 .

DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS

In the process of the invention, the padded product 1 to be recycled, such as an insulated jacket, a sleeping bag, a bed quilt, production scraps of padded material and the like, surplus productions, padded clothing in general, preliminarily washed and with metal or plastic parts removed, is placed in a decontamination chamber 2, which allows a bactericidal action to be performed thereon, for example through contact with UV radiation, with an ozone current and the like.

The product 1 thus processed in the decontamination chamber 2 is then transferred, by means of a conveyor belt 3, to a compression station 4, equipped with a pair of rollers 5 between which the product 1 is crushed and compressed, so as to make it more workable in the subsequent stations.

Preferably, a metal detector is also provided, capable of detecting the pres- ence of any metal parts to be eliminated.

At the exit from station 4, the crushed product 1 is then processed, in a whole comprising padding and fabrics, inside a station 6, which carries out a de- fibering and tearing treatment of all these materials together and simultaneously. For this purpose, in the station 6 two pairs 7 and 8 of rotating plates are provided, one of which is better illustrated in Figure 2.

In particular, each of said pairs of plates is formed by an upper plate 9 and a lower plate 10 with mutually opposing rotation (arrows F1 and F2 in Figure 2). The facing surfaces of the plates 9 and 10, between which the product 1 coming from the compression station 4 is processed, have needles 11 and 12, with different sizes and density, and in a staggered arrangement between the needles 11 of the plate 9 and the needles 12 of the plate 10.

Advantageously, according to the invention, the needles 11 ,12 of the aforementioned pairs 7,8 of plates 9,10 are shaped like an arc or carding willow, as better illustrated in Figure 4.

Even more advantageously, the pair 7 of plates which first receives the product 1 from the compression station 4 has large-size needles 11 ,12, for example with a thickness of 4 mm at the root 11a and of 2 mm at the tip 11 b, distributed with a density of, for example, 2 needles/cm ² The subsequent pair 8 of plates 9,10 instead has needles 11 ,12 of smaller dimensions than the previous pair, for example 2 mm at the root and 1 mm at the tip, distributed with a higher density, for example 6 needles/cm ² . Preferably the length of the needles of said pairs of plates ranges between 2 and 3 cm.

In this way, the first pair of plates 7 performs a first coarse tearing of the padded product 1 , whereas the second pair of plates 8 performs a finer and more complete tearing of the fibers of the fabric and the wadding. In this way, raw fibers of wadding and fabric come out from the first pair 7 of plates 9,10, whereas from the second pair of plates 8, thinner and shorter fibers are obtained than those coming from the previous pair of plates 9,10.

The fibrous material obtained in station 6 is then transferred, by means of suitable pneumatic conveying systems not illustrated, to the subsequent station 13 for transforming said fibrous material into a thin layer of parallelized fibers which substantially form a wadding layer.

In particular, said station 13 is provided with two pairs of cylinders 14 and 15, which transform the fibrous material prepared in the previous station 6 into a layer of parallelized fibers. To this end, each pair of cylinders 14 and 15 is composed of an upper cylinder 16 and a lower cylinder 17, with mutually opposite directions of rotation F3 and F4 (Figure 3). Each cylinder 16 and 17 also bears needles 18 and 19, respectively, with different length and density, fixed on suitable supports in a staggered arrangement between the needles 18 of the cylinder 16 and the needles 19 of the cylinder 17. Advantageously, the needles 18 and 19 of the first pair of cylinders 14 have larger dimensions (length and thickness) than those of the second pair 15 arranged downstream of the previous one. Preferably, the pair 14 of cylinders 16,17 which first receives the fibers from the previous station 6 has a lower density of needles 18,19 than that of the needles present on the subsequent pair 15 of cylinders.

Thanks to the aforementioned pairs of cylinders present in station 13, the fabric and wadding fibers, which come out from the previous station 6 in bulk and in a disorderly orientation, are stretched and arranged parallel to one another, so as to form a single layer of fibers, suitable for being transformed into wadding flocks in the next station.

The layer of material that comes out of station 13 is then sucked by an aspirator 20 inside a subsequent air circulation station 21 , in which the textile material layer, from which the wadding flocks 22 are obtained, is torn and opened.

The process and plant described above therefore achieve the opening, together and simultaneously, of the different materials forming the product 1 to be recovered (fabrics, linings, padding of different nature, synthetic, artificial or natural, etc.), transforming them into a noble wadding fiber, usable as a padding material and for the insulation of new productions of easy-to-maintain thermal products.

The result is flocks 22 composed of a fiber which, even without having to be integrated with additional fibers with respect to those already present in the initial product 1 , can have a bulkiness (or Fill Power - FP) of at least 350-400 Cuin (inches ³ /ounce). If a higher FP is required, it is sufficient to add x percentage of fiber to the mixing chamber.

The product bulkiness, FP, significantly affects CLO values. Theoretically, we can consider that with an FP of 400 cuin of recovered material, enclosed in special fabrics, a CLO value of around 1 .7-1 .8 can be obtained. Modifications may be made to the invention as above described and illustrated in the figures in order to produce variants which, nevertheless, fall within the scope of the following claims. Thus, for example, the stations 6 and 13 of the plant of the invention could also have a single pair of rotating plates and a single pair of cylinders, respectively. Furthermore, since the described defibering and tearing station 6 and the station 13 forming the wadding are essential for the invention, the decontamination chamber 2 could be omitted.