Live from Bremen: Cotton Breeders Seek to Predict Yarn Quality
March 22, 2012 In their quest to predict the quality of ring-spun yarn, cotton and textile professionals don’t need to wait until the fiber is produced. In fact, they don’t even need to wait until the cotton is planted – modern cotton breeders can accurately predict the individual yarn quality of a breeding line without spinning any lint into yarn at all.
That was the message delivered by Dr. Eric F. Hequet, associate director of the Fiber and Biopolymer Research Institute at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, during his March 22 presentation at the Bremen International Cotton Conference.
“Predicting the ‘process-ability’ of the raw material is a very challenging task,” Dr. Hequet said during his presentation, Predicting Yarn Quality: An Indispensable Tool for Cotton Breeders. “Knowing which fiber quality attributes have the greatest potential to produce high-quality, ring-spun yarns is critical for spinning mills, but it’s also critical to cotton’s ability to compete effectively with man-made fibers.”
One of the basic objectives of Dr. Hequet’s research was to study the spinability of cottons (carded and combed ring-spun yarns) and to derive from that research recommendations about which fiber parameters need to be improved through breeding, agronomic practices, and/or material handling. To determine the relationships between fiber properties and yarn quality, two sets of commercial cotton bales were selected based on their distinct physical properties and tested on high volume instruments (HVI) and the Advanced Fiber Information System (AFIS).
The results showed that the combination of HVI and AFIS data allowed researchers to predict the quality of ring-spun yarn for commercial bales quite accurately. “A better measurement of both short-fiber content and trash content should allow us to predict, nearly perfectly, the quality of ring-spun yarns,” Dr. Hequet said. “Such models, if confirmed on an independent set of commercial bales, could be invaluable for cotton breeders.”
Breeder samples often contain more trash particles than commercial bales because they are ginned on small-scale ginning equipment, and the presence of excessive trash content in the lint could have a very negative effect on the quality of predictions for all yarn evenness-related parameters.
Terry Townsend, executive director of the International Cotton Advisory Committee and chair of the Cotton Production session at the conference, asked Dr. Hequet about the time and cost associated with AFIS testing. “You can run 50 samples in a typical eight-hour day if you look at 9,000 fibers per sample,” he responded. After his presentation, Dr. Hequet told Cotton International, “Obviously, there is some additional time and cost associated with AFIS testing, but it’s worth it. Personally, I like to look at 15,000 fibers per sample. The additional information it provides is more than worth the time and effort.”
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