Location: Cotton Ginning Research
Project Number: 6066-41440-009-021-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 27, 2024
End Date: Sep 30, 2025
Objective:
Current fiber hemp agronomic and breeding work is limited to quantifying retted straw weight and bast weight if institutions have small-scale decorticators. Analysis of fiber quality and determination of suitability for downstream applications is limited to hand processing very small amounts and is not representative of industry practices or output. Furthermore, these small amounts do not allow for prototyping end-use products with processed fibers or analysis of downstream applications. This project has three objectives to help foster the emerging domestic industrial hemp industry.
1. Establish a small-scale fiber hemp processing hub that takes raw bast from field trials and prepares it for degumming and downstream analysis.
2. Develop processing protocols for analysis of fiber quality.
3. Develop a pipeline for supplying fiber and hurd samples for characterization and analysis.
Approach:
The Cooperator houses the only textiles college in the United States and is therefore uniquely enabled to both test and process fibers. The Cooperator has on-going efforts to produce industrial hemp at plot and field-scale. This project will leverage existing resources and projects to complement these efforts to establish a processing hub in which fiber hemp produced from field trials can be processed, resulting in small batches of material that can then be analyzed for quality and end-use applicability (Objective 1). The processing hub will obtain additional equipment to allow small-scale samples to be processed from stem to fiber/hurd in ways that accurately reflect industrial approaches but range from several pounds to 100 pounds of material. This small-scale processing hub is needed to provide material for developing both processing and characterization protocols (Objective 2). Objective 2 will be achieved by using materials from Objective 1 for both in-house testing and processing as well as supplying consistently processed samples to collaborators for the development of fiber characterization test methods. The supplying of materials to in-house and collaborative test method development efforts achieves the third objective of the project.
The Cooperator will leverage existing field trials as well as existing relationships and equipment to achieve the objectives of the project. The Cooperator has a 16 cylinder long staple decorticator for separation of bast fiber from hurd. A rotary cutter, 2-cylinder fiber opener, and condensor sized for the processing of small batches will complete the capabilities to provide much needed materials to the research efforts.
