For factories, the most critical factor affecting production efficiency is unexpected downtime, especially when critical components like industrial felt blankets fail.
Downtime causes the entire production line to stop working, resulting in millions or even tens of millions of losses. Lost business and maintenance costs are the most obvious consequences of downtime.
Therefore, understanding, analyzing, and reducing downtime will give companies a huge advantage in the competition because this knowledge enables them to plan production based on tangible facts and figures.
Productivity loss: An aluminum extrusion production line suffers huge losses due to downtime.
According to experience and statistics, downtime losses are 18 yuan per minute, not to mention the production capacity lost during downtime due to no output.
Emergency repairs: Although replacing worn industrial felt blankets may be inexpensive, proactive monitoring of industrial felt blanket wear can prevent secondary damage to bearings or transmission components, which may increase repair costs to more than tens of thousands of yuan.
Labor costs: Employee wages and utility bills are also huge costs. When equipment fails, the company will produce less output using the same labor and facility space.
In addition to the most direct cost of downtime, other costs may be difficult to calculate but will negatively affect a company’s performance.
The first is the cost of running out of inventory. If production is suspended for a few hours, inventory will begin to run low.
Once production resumes, the factory will have to make up for the lost productivity to continue to supply customers with goods as usual.
This means that employees may have to work overtime and machines will be working at full capacity, which will increase costs.
If the factory cannot make it, late delivery will usually result in a penalty. If the customer is not supplied promptly, the manufacturer may face the cost of losing a customer.
When downtime affects customers, they may begin to question your ability to supply on time and start to consider working with more reliable suppliers.
Quality control overhead: Defective industrial felt can cause surface scratches on products, adding about $5,000 in labor and testing costs each year.
Machine failures account for 60-70% of unplanned downtime in extrusion lines, with over 30% linked to degraded industrial felt blanket seals in hydraulic systems, highlighting the need for robust industrial felt blanket maintenance protocols.
For example, in aluminum extrusion plants, 30% of hydraulic failures can be attributed to degraded industrial felt blanket seals.
Lack of timely machine maintenance can also cause minor problems to escalate into major failures.
Delayed preventive maintenance: Late replacement of wear-prone parts, such as industrial felt blankets, can lead to extended downtime for repairs.
Data: Companies that replace felts at 80% wear (rather than 100% failure) can reduce maintenance time by 40%.
Inventory shortages: A 2025 survey found that 25% of extended extrusion line downtime was due to delayed arrival of specialty felts (e.g., high-temperature grades).
Utility failures: A 30-minute power outage at an aluminum extrusion plant required reheating dies to temperature, resulting in additional electricity costs and lost production.
The maintenance status of the extruder has a significant impact on whether profile defects will occur.
According to factors such as the type of equipment, frequency of use, and failure history, a reasonable maintenance plan should be formulated, including regular inspections, replacement of parts, cleaning, and lubrication.
Train professional equipment maintenance personnel to ensure they have the necessary skills and knowledge to properly perform equipment maintenance work.
Using technologies such as vibration sensors to monitor equipment health and provide early warning of potential failures allows proactive intervention and significantly reduces unplanned downtime.
One company we worked with reported a 70% reduction in downtime after implementing vibration monitoring on its high temperature felt components.
Effective inventory management, including maintaining a safety stock (e.g., a three-month supply) of critical spare parts such as frequently replaced industrial felt blanket components, can significantly reduce downtime by eliminating delays associated with procuring replacement parts.
Material Upgrade: Low-grade industrial felt blankets are replaced every three days on average, but upgrading to ISO-certified industrial felt blankets extends lifespan by 3x, reducing annual replacement frequency by 70%.
By using our company’s industrial felt, the life span is extended by three times. Although the unit price is 30% higher, the annual replacement frequency is reduced by 70%, and the overall cost is reduced by 40%.
To illustrate the impact of a specific component, I use industrial felt as an example. Industrial felt blanket is often used for sealing, shock absorption, insulation, filtration, or surface protection.
Industrial felt failure can lead to direct consequences, such as lubrication failure (damage to bearings), increased vibration (affecting equipment accuracy), or surface defects in aluminum profile products (needing to be redone).
Indirect effects can be more serious, and seal failure can cause oil leaks, contaminate production lines, or even create fire hazards.
Our industrial felts are in aluminum, textile, laundry, steel, and other industries. The performance of industrial felt blanket is determined by the fiber material, density, thickness, and post-processing process, and needs to be precisely customized according to the needs of different industries.
Our industrial felts are tested and certified by SGS. Our high temperature felts meet ISO 9001:2015 standards, which is 100% higher than conventional products.
Aluminum extrusion industry: Aluminum profiles produced by aluminum extrusion plants are transported through kevlar belts.
Kevlar belts increase the load-bearing capacity and reduce the stretching of the felt conveyor belt, ensuring stability even under extreme thermal stress on industrial felt blankets， providing sufficient stability.
Textile industry: In the textile industry, heat press pads can be used as a protective layer or transmission layer for heat presses, ironing machines, and forming machines to prevent textiles from being contaminated or damaged at high temperatures, and can improve the performance and quality of textiles.
Because it is seamless and can maintain uniform thickness, it has wear resistance and high-temperature resistance and can work at high temperatures to ensure the accuracy and clarity of the pattern and avoid any deviation or deformation.
Laundry Industry: Ironing machines are used to iron sheets and quilts, and folding machine belts are an important part of industrial ironing machines.
The ironing belt materials include Nomex and polyester. Our ironing belts have a soft felt surface, high fracture durability, and high air permeability, which enables the ironing machine belts to work better and improve efficiency.
Steel Industry: The steel belt cutting machine cuts the steel plate into steel strips of different sizes.
In this process, the polyester tension pad applies a certain amount of pressure to the steel belt because its smooth surface can ensure that the shape is not deformed and reduce friction, increasing the strength of the steel.
In 2023, during the equipment transformation project of Jiangsu Aluminum Plant, we found through monitoring that the extrusion cooling bed using ordinary felt had wear and tear gaps on average every half a month, resulting in 4 forced shutdowns per month.
The situation was even worse at the aluminum processing plant. The high temp belts in their factory equipment often cracked and blackened.
Each downtime for repairs was both expensive and delayed production.
Later, they switched to high-performance industrial felt blankets with enhanced wear resistance, reducing downtime from ten to one incident monthly, proving the ROI of premium industrial felt blankets.
This not only reduced the time for equipment repairs but also allowed the factory to produce a lot more products.
These two cases tell us that it is important to choose the right protective material. Although good quality materials are more expensive, they can effectively reduce equipment failures.
The factory can keep the production line running normally and save money on repeated repairs. This is a truly cost-effective choice. Companies should arrange a schedule for regular inspections, just like giving machines a physical examination.
A complete maintenance record book should be established for each equipment, with detailed records of each maintenance. At the same time, specialized equipment managers should be trained and taught the skills to deal with common problems.
Through this management method, factories can reduce sudden equipment shutdowns and ensure the normal operation of production lines.
Using certified industrial felt blankets and performing predictive maintenance can not only extend the life of equipment but also help companies increase production and reduce maintenance costs, ultimately achieving better operational benefits.
As we know, Heat Transfer Printing Felt is suitable for fabrics, decorative fabrics, curtains, le...
Read Safety Rules for Laundry Management to be a qualified manager. PARTⅠ Laundry room Safety Gen...
The aluminum extrusion machine is the leading equipment for the production of aluminum profiles. ...
Heat transfer printing is a contemporary printing process in the clothing market. It prints the p...
In the textile industry, felt is only a small part but important. About how to choose felt that i...
Foshan Pure Technology Company., Ltd. helps conveyor belt manufacturers source equipment to metal...
What is Nomex? Meta-amide, or meta-phenylene isophthalamide, is made from meta-phenylenediamine a...
Kevlar fiber Introduction In the development of materials science, Kevlar fiber has particularly ...
