Approaches to Characterize Lint Removed During Lint Cleaning

Ginned cotton lint contains foreign matter and less desirable short fiber after ginning and lint cleaners are commonly employed to improve the overall quality of ginned lint by removing this material.  In order to improve the efficiency and performance of lint cleaners, the entire material flow must be analyzed including both the quantity and quality of the material removed by the lint cleaner.  Typical analysis of material removed during lint cleaning is a mass-balance calculation to determine the percentage of material removed, while fiber quality testing is performed on the cleaned lint collected from the lint cleaner.  Several approaches were examined to characterize the waste flow in greater detail, including the percentage of lint and non-lint content in the waste stream and the quality of the lint in the waste stream to better understand fiber quality changes during lint cleaning.  A variety of methods were explored utilizing hand-sorting of the waste material as well as mechanical sorting of the waste material.  Lint quality in the waste material was examined using AFIS both with and without removal of the non-lint material.