Acoustic Sensing of Seed-Cotton Trash Levels

Modern cotton gins have a limited capability for handling varying levels of trash in the seed cotton.  They can however slow down to provide another level of control.  Due to the economics of running the gin plant, this is however a last resort that should only be done for the highest levels of trash where there is a high probability that the gin wouldn’t be able to clean up the cotton lint to where the out- going cotton lint below a leaf grade four and would thereby incur discounts onto the final bale grades.  In the interest of providing a means to assess seed-cotton as to the trash-levels, for use as a control signal to the ginner or the plc computer controlling the plant, this research explores the potential use of acoustic sensing for assessing seed-cotton trash levels. This study reports on the performance of the single microphone variant of the Simplified-Three-Microphone Acoustic Test Method, for use in predicting the trash content in seed-cotton.