Investigation of a Multivariate Correction Method for HVI Fibrogram Measurements

Abstract

Cotton fiber length parameters are used across the cotton industry to select elite germplasm, purchase cotton bales and manage mill throughput. The High Volume Instrument (HVI) provides the most commonly used fiber length parameters, upper half mean length (UHML) and uniformity index (UI). UI is the ratio of mean length (ML) to the UHML expressed as a percentage. These length parameters, UHML and ML, are generated following the fibrograph principle and are highly correlated with two span lengths on the fibrogram curve. These two length parameters represent a small part of the fibrogram and do not characterize the total within-sample variation. In previous studies, we found that fiber length variation captured by the whole fibrogram improves the prediction of yarn quality. However, HVIs are currently calibrated for UHML and UI. In this study, we investigated a correction method using a set of 461 commercial samples to correct the whole fibrogram curve across HVIs and validated the method using an independent set of 932 commercial samples. The correction procedure lowers the Euclidian distance between fibrograms as much as 35%, bringing the fibrogram measurements into agreement across multiple HVIs. This indicates that the whole fibrogram could be used to improve HVI fiber length measurements across the cotton industry.