What is carding process?

During the spinning process, carding is the second process of spinning. During the carding process, the fibers are disentangled, cleaned and then intermixed with other fiber batches in order to produce a continuous web or uniform strand of fibers called “sliver” suitable for further processing. The quality of final yarns and the percentages of neps in the yarns, both depend on the carding process of the fiber. And because of this, the carding process is also called the heart of the spinning process.

The main objectives of the carding process are to open up the individual fibers, to remove impurities contained in the fibers, removal of neps and entanglements in the fibers and; parallelizing and stretching of the fiber.

Carding is mainly done for natural fibers such as cotton and wool. It is a mechanical process where the raw fibers are passed through a carding machine. Then the fibers are passed between differentially moving surfaces which are covered with card cloth. The locks and unorganized clumps that are present in the fiber are removed and the fiber is aligned parallel to each other individually. Thus this process helps to remove all types of impurities present in the fiber and a continuous uniform sliver having parallel fiber arrangement is obtained after the according to process.