Effects of Lint Cleaning on Lint Trash Particle Size Distribution

Cotton quality trash measurements used today typically yield a single value for trash parameters for a lint sample (i.e. High Volume Instrument – percent area; Advanced Fiber Information System – total count, trash size, dust count, trash count, and visible foreign matter). A Cotton Trash Identification System (CTIS) developed at the USDA-ARS Southwestern Cotton Ginning Research Laboratory was used to identify and size trash objects in the lint samples collected before and after lint cleaning as part of a two-year beltwide commercial cotton gin sampling project. The CTIS trash categorizations were used to develop particle size distributions (PSD) for the lint samples. These PSD were then compared to assess the effect of lint cleaning on, not just a single value for trash content, but the shape and scale of the trash PSD. Also, different probability density functions were explored to characterize the shape of the lint trash PSD.