Affiliation:
1. Cotton Structure & Quality Research Unit, Southern Regional Research Center (SRRC), USDA, USA
Abstract
With the increasing acceptance of high volume instrument (HVI™) instrumental leaf grade index in both domestic and international trading, there is a continued interest in the relationship between instrumental leaf grade and equivalent trash gravimetric content (% percent by mass) from cotton customers and regulators. Due to the complexity of not only trash type, size, and its weight distribution but also the nature of HVI and gravimetric methods, it is an on-going challenge to examine such a relationship. In this study, the Shirley Analyzer (SA) was used to determine the gravimetric cotton trash in percent by mass (%). This system is the traditional cotton trash reference method that is still utilized as a routine tool in the cotton industry, despite being a destructive process that is both labor-intensive and time-consuming. This study first investigated the correlations between three SA trash readings ( SAvisible, SAinvisible, and SAtotal) and respective leaf grade categories, and it revealed a general trend of increasing SAvisible and SAtotal trash content with elevating leaf grade. Then, comparison of SAvisible trash content in the current study to that in separate studies indicated a good agreement for low leaf grade cottons (<4). Next, the principal component analysis of near infrared spectra from SAvisible trash portions revealed a different pattern in PC1 score between low leaf grade (1–4) and high leaf grade (5 and 6) SA visible trash remains, implying a general change of more leaf-related trash in low leaf grade cottons to more non-leaf-related trash in high leaf grade cottons.
Subject
Polymers and Plastics,Chemical Engineering (miscellaneous)