Due to the number of operations carried out and their crucial importance, the carding room equipment is a complex and imposing installation. Its role, basically, is to produce extremely regular rovings at the highest speeds compatible with the process.

The criterion which determines how many cards are used is above all the type of material being processed, in other words, the fineness of the fibre and the openness of the blend: characteristics that in turn determine the fibre count that can be achieved.

Indeed the equipment, like the whole spinning process generally, is quite rigidly specialised for the production of fine, medium and coarse counts, whose spinnability is influenced by the density of the clothings and by their number, by the number of carding points (the more of these there are the finer the count), by the number of rovings produced by the divider, and by the speed of the various cylinders. The number of machines and drums used depends on the extent of carding and blending that is necessary.

The automatic two-card system is suitable for processing coarse counts or high-quality yarns for knitted or woven goods, while the three-card system is mainly employed to process new or regenerated materials.

Fig. 1 Two- and three-card installations