Author
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Anthony, William |
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Submitted to: National Cotton Council Beltwide Cotton Conference
Publication Type: Proceedings Publication Acceptance Date: 1/24/2000 Publication Date: 6/1/2000 Citation: Anthony, W.S. 2000. Prediction of stickiness of selected cotton samples. National Cotton Council Beltwide Cotton Conference. Volume 2:1514-1515 Interpretive Summary: Stickiness of cotton fiber that is caused by whiteflies and aphids greatly reduces the desirability of cotton to the textile industry. This worldwide problem is often detected only after the cotton is being processed at the textile mill. Current methods to detect stickiness are destructive, slow and subjective. A new, USDA-patented, non-destructive device was compared to the existing test methods. Results indicated greater then 75% accuracy with the new device. Since the new device can be used online and without operator assistance at the gin and textile mill, early detection will allow mitigation of the stickiness. Cotton usefulness and value will be increased. Technical Abstract: A new device to rapidly estimate the stickiness of both seed cotton and lint cotton was patented in 1997. This study further evaluated the new device using 500 reference samples that were evaluated with a standard thermodetector as well as an automated thermodetector (H2SD) at other laboratories. Measurement of the stickiness of cotton is typically accomplished with the thermodetector method which is time-consuming, somewhat objective, and destructive. In this study, samples were classified into level of stickiness from 0 to 3 based on the thermodetector as the reference method. The thermodetectors differed from each other as to level of stickiness about 80% of the time and misclassified the samples as to sticky or non-sticky 22% of the time. The new device correctly identified 76% of the samples as either sticky or non-sticky when compared to either thermodetector. |
