Estimation of AFIS Short Fiber Content Using the HVI Fibrogram

Short Fiber Content (SFC), fibers shorter than 0.5 inch, is a critical fiber quality parameters for textile processing. Having a high amount of SFC in a bale results in increased yarn imperfections. It also increases the waste during processing and lower the processing efficiency. Therefore, a fast and reliable method of measuring SFC would be very useful to spinning mills and cotton breeders.

The Advanced Fiber Information System (AFIS) provides a measurement of SFC. However, AFIS is too slow to be used in a large breeding program or cotton classification. Thus, many researchers and textile mills use the High Volume Instrument (HVI) Short Fiber Index (SFI) as an SFC estimate. Recent studies show that HVI fibrogram holds important within-sample variation in fiber length. Theoretically, the fibrogram is the second integral of the length distribution histogram . Therefore, it might be possible to estimate the SFC using the HVI fibrogram. In this experiment, we estimated AFIS SFC by number and by weight using fibrograms from a set of 1,000 commercial samples. The results show that the estimated SFC using the fibrogram can explain AFIS SFC better than the SFI. The estimated SFC using the fibrogram could explain approximately 70% of the variation in AFIS SFC by number and 80% of the variation in AFIS SFC by weight while SFI could explain only 56% of the variation in AFIS SFC by number and 66% of the variation in AFIS SFC by weight.