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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 #158888
Title: MEASUREMENT OF THE BROKEN FIBER CONTENT OF COTTON

Author
item Robert Jr, Kearny
item Cui, Xiaoliang
item Price, John

Submitted to: National Cotton Council Beltwide Cotton Conference
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/1/2003
Publication Date: 6/1/2003
Citation: Robert Jr, K.Q., Cui, X., Price, J.B. Measurement of the broken fiber content of cotton [abstract]. National Cotton Council Beltwide Cotton Conference. p.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: A method was developed whereby a recent mathematical breakthrough could be applied to the interpretation of the cotton length distribution. The analytical concept employed was that cotton fiber length distributions belong to special families of mathematical curves. These functions, sometimes called Robert distributions, have the property that differences between their shapes are generated by different degrees of random fiber breakage having occurring within a finite number of fibers comprising the batch being described. In particular, the change in length distribution (relative to a standard reference distribution such as Gaussian by mass) which is manifested due to a processing sequence is numerically related to the fiber breakage which occurs in that process. The analysis is based on the assumption of conservation of length and conservation of mass during every single breaking event. If this approach is applied to cotton processing associated with the production of a cotton bale, it can be used to define the amount of breaking damage that has been accumulated by the fiber. The practical relevance lies in the fact that the amount of breakage to the bale fiber can be determined from the fiber length distribution measured on a sample from that bale. This quantity, the fraction by mass of broken fibers, is called Broken Fiber Content (BFC), and is proposed as an improvement over Short Fiber Content (SFC) as an index of cotton fiber damage. A major conclusion of this work is that due to the intrinsically discrete nature of fibers and the physics of fiber breaks, cotton fiber length distributions are described more effectively by digital rather than analog mathematical relationships