Christopher Turner

Knowledge of cotton fiber length uniformity is important for the cotton industry. The accurate and reliable measurement of fiber length uniformity would allow cotton breeders to release new cotton varieties with improved fiber length variation. This knowledge would also help spinning mills to optimize their machine setup, which would improve yarn processing performance. Currently, the high volume instrument (HVI) is most commonly used to characterize the cotton fiber length variation. The HVI length measurement is based on the fibrogram principle. The HVI length measurement characterizes 2 points, 1.8% as the upper half mean length (UHML) and 7.8% span length as the mean length (ML) from the fibrogram, and reports UHML and uniformity index (UI). The ratio of ML to the UHML is used to calculate the UI and is expressed as a percentage. UI measurement does not represent the shorter fibers as the above two span lengths only represent the longest fibers within a sample. We propose to calculate the uniformity of the cotton fiber length using the complete fibrogram as an alternative. First, the area of the measured fibrogram curve is calculated. Second, the area of a theoretical mono-length fibrogram with a length equal to the maximum length of the fibers for the same sample is calculated. Finally, we calculate a new length uniformity as the ratio of the measured fibrogram area to the mono-length fibrogram area expressed as a percentage. Based on the results obtained using a set of 991 commercial samples, the new length uniformity shows promise. We also applied this new length uniformity to a set of 60 commercial-like samples and developed partial least square regression (PLSR) prediction models to predict yarn quality. The results obtained demonstrate that the new length uniformity predicts yarn quality better than the current UI.