Preliminary Studies of Cotton Non-Lint Content Identification by Ultraviolet-Visible Spectroscopy

Cotton trash can become comingled with the lint during the harvesting and processing of cotton. Compounding this problem is the tendency of cotton trash to become smaller in size during the processing of cotton.  Thus, the development of a method which can analyze these small trash samples based on their chemical or physical properties would be advantageous. In addition, high specificity in the determination of the type of cotton trash present would be desirable. A program was implemented to determine the capabilities of Ultraviolet-Visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy to classify cotton trash components, including hull, leaf, seed coat, seed meat, and stem. Minute spectral differences between the cotton trash components were used to classify the cotton trash types. The advantages of this method include moderate cost, short analysis time, and non-destruction of samples.