Location: Cotton Structure and Quality Research
Project Number: 6054-44000-079-000-D
Project Type: In-House Appropriated
Start Date: Jul 14, 2015
End Date: Jul 13, 2020
Objective:
Objective 1: Enable, from a technological standpoint, new rapid and accurate commercial methods to assess cotton fiber quality.
Objective 2: Enable economical, accurate and real-time methods to assess product quality and process efficiencies in pre-mill operations.
Objective 3: Enable new commercial methods to detect, quantify and remove undesirable non-lint materials such as various sugars, seed coat fragments, non-leaf plant trash, etc. from cotton.
Objective 4: In collaboration with industry partners, determine the impact of fiber quality and fiber processing practices on yarn and fabric quality and processing efficiencies.
Objective 5: In collaboration with industry partners, determine the expected impact of new germplasms, agronomic practices, and ginning practices upon fiber quality, textile processing efficiency, and final product quality.
Approach:
The U.S. cotton and textile industries agree on the need to increase U.S. cotton’s value and global competitiveness. It is proposed that this need be met by enabling new technologies and methods for accurately assessing the quality and processing efficiencies of cotton fiber at various processing stages from field to fabric. The first objective addresses the need for new rapid and accurate fiber quality assessments in the laboratory. Comprehensive evaluations will be conducted to broaden the technical and commercial attractiveness of image analysis, spectroscopy, microscopy, and color technologies to discern new measurements, with initial emphasis on 3-dimensional color, maturity, fineness, fiber diameter, fiber structure, and the relationship of these properties to key fiber quality properties. The second objective addresses the need for economical, accurate and real-time methods to assess product quality and process efficiencies outside of the laboratory in pre-mill operations. Comprehensive evaluations with state of the art spectroscopy and imaging instrumentation will be conducted to develop new quality measurement and monitoring methods for pre-harvest and post-harvest applications and operations. The third objective addresses the need for new assessments of non-lint materials and contaminants to provide improved tools for measuring, controlling and removing these non-lint materials. The development of rapid, accurate and non-destructive image scanning of seed coat fragments (SCF) and seed coat neps (SCN) will be developed, and these techniques will be used to understand what the AFIS is sensing when measuring SCN in fiber. Comprehensive evaluations with advanced chemical imaging spectroscopy technologies will be conducted to establish rapid detection and trash type identification protocols. State-of-the-art elemental analysis, chromatography, and spectroscopy technologies will be used to develop chemical measurements of fiber surface species, to include metal ions, sugars, amino acids/proteins, pectins, and waxes. These properties will be correlated to properties impacting fiber processing efficiency (i.e., stickiness and fiber friction). The fourth objective addresses the need for determining fiber quality-processing practices relationships and their impacts on product quality and processing efficiencies. In-house traditional and non-traditional quality measurements and textile processing will be used to determine the efficacy of these tests to predict processing efficiency and yarn/fabric quality and to understand the impact of fiber properties and processing on textile quality and efficiencies. The fifth objective addresses the need for determining the fiber quality-processing efficiency-product quality relationships. Comprehensive evaluations will be conducted on new germplasms using fiber quality and miniature-scale ring spinning. Advanced spectroscopic technologies will be used to characterize developing cotton fibers and their fine structure, their cell walls and physical properties.
