An investigation on different parameters used for characterizing short cotton fibers

Abstract

The quantity of short fibers in a cotton sample is an important cotton quality parameter. Short cotton fibers have detrimental impacts on yarn production performance and yarn quality. There are different parameters for characterizing the amount of short fibers in a cotton sample. The most widely used parameter is short fiber content (SFC). However, SFC has a significant shortcoming of very high measured variation. An investigation was carried out to compare the short fiber parameters to find a parameter that has lower variation and predicts yarn properties similarly as SFC does, including SFC defined at 0.5 inch length, SFC defined at 16 mm length, lower half mean length (LHML), floating fiber index (FFI), floating fiber percentage (FFP), and relative short fiber content (Rel. SFC). Based on our experimental data, we found that LHML had the lowest variation, was highly correlated with SFC, and predicted yarn properties similarly as SFC did. Therefore, LHML is a suitable alternative to short fiber content.