Colour Mixing Modelling and Simulation: Optimization of Colour Recipe for Carded Fibres

Colour matching between carded and finished fibres is an importantchallenge for textile industry. The straightforward approach formixing together some differently coloured fibres in order toobtain a blend of a desired colour is to perform a trial and errorapproach starting from a given colour recipe and optimizing itwith several attempts. Unfortunately, dyeing process so as thecarding procedure may result in a carded fibre whose colour isdifferent from the desired one. As a consequence textile companieshave to modify the original recipe in order to reduce the gapbetween the colour of the final product and the desired one. Thepresent work describes a model able to simulate the colour mixingof fibres in order to assess the best recipe. The model consistsin two modules: a “prediction module” predicts the colour of ablend obtained by mixing together several fibres; an “optimizationmodule” is used to optimize the final recipe. The devised systemhas been tested for optimizing the recipe of a set of 200 blends. The mean error in predicting the blend colour is about 15% with avariance of 0.165. The time for optimizing the recipe is reducedby 92%