Miniature Spinning as a Tool for Ginning Research

The cotton gin must balance efficient processing and cleaning with adversely affecting the quality of lint through damage and/or failure to remove sufficient material.  Substantial research is conducted on all aspects of the cotton gin; however it is difficult to gauge the effect on fiber quality without converting samples into textile products.  The USDA conducts ginning research at three facilities; however there are only two USDA facilities available for textile processing.  Ginning researchers have a need for rapid textile processing of samples in order to better assess the results of their research.  One approach is the use of improved miniature spinning to pre-screen samples for a subset of samples to be processed on a larger-scale.  This approach allows the limited textile processing capacity to be more efficiently utilized.  Researchers are able to receive results in a more timely manner allowing research to move at a faster pace and more projects to be serviced by the textile labs.  Current large-scale textile processing is limited to about 400 (150 lb samples) samples per year at the Cotton Quality Research Station plus 200 (25 lb samples) samples per year at the Southern Regional Research Center.  Miniature-spinning at the Southern Regional Research Center is capable of processing 800-1000 (~60 g samples) samples per year and work is underway to double the capacity. Improved miniature spinning has been shown to more closely replicate large-scale textile processing than previous generations of sub-100 gram processing techniques.