Cottonscope - advantages in measuring cotton fibre fineness and maturity separately

摘要

Cottonscope is a new instrument that measures cotton fibre fineness and maturity quickly, directly and accurately in the same measurement. At the moment, because of the cotton industry's historical reliance on the Micronaire instrument, no information on these properties is given to the market. The new Cottonscope instrument provides an opportunity for the market to revalue cotton on the basis of its fineness and maturity properties, and provide growers with real incentives to produce fine, mature cotton for spinners. The Micronaire instrument, which measures the pressure differential of air forced or pulled through a compressed plug of raw cotton fibres, was originally used to measure cotton fibre fineness. However, it was soon understood that the instrument actually measured a combination of fineness and maturity (Lord, 1956).