Investigation On Cotton Fiber Breakage

Mechanical processes such as harvesting, ginning, and cleaning can potentially break fibers and introduce non-native variability into cotton fiber quality. Fiber breakage from mechanical processing hinders cultivar selection by obfuscating the native fiber quality within a sample. A method is proposed for mitigating the impact of fiber breakage on the within sample distributions of fiber length. The Advanced Fiber Information System (AFIS) provides within sample distribution of cotton fiber quality. The individualizer rotor within the AFIS can potentially break fibers as they are pulled from the sliver. Differences in the fiber length distribution between the consecutive runs are quantified by parameterizing the breakage mechanism. Parameters measured from the AFIS individualizer are used to estimate the broken fiber content introduced by fiber individualization. The impact of the AFIS fiber individualizer can be mitigated once the broken fiber distribution created by the mechanism is characterized. In order to characterize the fiber quality variability introduced by the AFIS opener, 37 cottons were selected to capture a wide range of variability in fiber quality. Each cotton sample was formed into 10x10k fiber slivers for AFIS fiber quality evaluation. After each sample was evaluated, the waste fiber was collected and reformed into slivers. This was continued through 5 consecutive AFIS runs for each of the 37 cottons. The broken fiber content introduced by the AFIS opening rotor was characterized using this method.