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ARS Home » Southeast Area » New Orleans, Louisiana » Southern Regional Research Center » Cotton Structure and Quality Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #249804
Title: APPROACHES TO CHARACTERIZE LINT REMOVED DURING LINT CLEANING

Author
item Delhom, Chris
item Boykin Jr, James
item MARTIN, VIKKI - Cotton, Inc
item BARNES, ED - Cotton, Inc

Submitted to: National Cotton Council Beltwide Cotton Conference
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 2/8/2010
Publication Date: 4/28/2010
Citation: Delhom, C.D., Boykin Jr, J.C., Martin, V., Barnes, E. 2010. APPROACHES TO CHARACTERIZE LINT REMOVED DURING LINT CLEANING. Proceeding of the 2010 National Cotton Council Beltwide Cotton Conference, January 5-7, 2010, New Olreans, Louisiana. p. 741-748. 2010 CDROM.

Interpretive Summary: Knowledge of the fiber quality of lint contained in lint cleaner waste is important in order to understand what material is being removed during lint cleaning. Lint cleaning is a balance between improving the quality and value of the baled material and removing excessive valuable material which negatively impacts the producer. A simple mass-balance tells a portion of the story, but the quality of the lint must be ascertained. Simple analyses, such as Shirley Analyzer, are important to determine the percentage of lint in the waste stream; however, it is equally important to assess the quality of the lint in the waste stream. The waste stream, by design, contains more non-lint material than lint and this confounds the problem. Although the AFIS is not designed to examine lint quality in such a heavily contaminated sample, it appears adequate for the task at hand. Sorting the lint cleaner waste, either mechanically or by hand, did not readily improve the ability of the AFIS to detect differences between lint cleaner treatments, or in some cases may mask differences. Mechanical sorting of the lint from the waste stream was shown to have some impact on the measured values due to unintentional damage of the lint. Hand-sorting of lint cleaner waste did reveal that only a limited portion of the lint content in the waste stream is indeed free-clean lint. Most of the lint in the waste stream was physically entrained with non-lint content.

Technical Abstract: Ginned cotton lint contains foreign matter and less desirable short fiber after ginning. Lint cleaners are commonly employed to improve the overall quality of ginned lint by removing this material. In order to improve the efficiency and performance of lint cleaners, the entire material flow must be analyzed including both the quantity and quality of the material removed by the lint cleaner. Typical analysis of material removed during lint cleaning is a mass-balance calculation to determine the percentage of material removed, while fiber quality testing is performed on the cleaned lint collected from the lint cleaner. Several approaches were examined to characterize the waste flow in greater detail, including the percentage of lint and non-lint content in the waste stream and the quality of the lint in the waste stream to better understand fiber quality changes during lint cleaning. A variety of methods were explored utilizing hand-sorting of the waste material as well as mechanical sorting of the waste material. Lint quality in the waste material was examined using AFIS both with and without removal of the non-lint material.