H. Hob Ramey, Jr., Assistant to the Associate Deputy Administrator, Cotton Program, AMS, U. S. Department of Agriculture

Last year at this conference, I reported on fiber property measurements proposed for addition to the seven being made by the High Volume Instrument (HVI) systems (Ramey, 1997). The currently measured seven properties are fiber length, fiber length uniformity, fiber strength, micronaire reading, percent area of trash, reflectance (Rd), and yellowness (+b). Measures that have been proposed include sugar and/or stickiness, elongation-to-break, and short fiber content. Of these, the short fiber content measurement is being evaluated for the possibility of determining this property by HVI.

Six criteria for accepting a measurement in the HVI system were also enumerated in last year's report. These six criteria are that the measurement: (1) must be meaningful, (2) have sufficient speed, (3) be reproducible, (4) have a procedure for calibrating many systems to a common level, (5) be reliable and (6) be economically feasible.

Short fiber content was measured on more than 80,000 samples from September through December 1997. An interim report on these evaluations of the short fiber content measurement was given at the 1998 Beltwide Cotton Conferences (Ramey, 1998). The need for a mechanism to calibrate all lines to a common result level was pointed out in the interim report.

A revised short fiber content measurement, which includes a procedure for calibrating to a common result level, was recently received. This procedure will be extensively evaluated according to the above criteria on up to 100,000 samples in the coming season. A report will be given at the end of the year. If the data look promising, we will work with the industry to determine what additional steps will be needed to assess the feasibility of adding this measurement to the current system.

References
Ramey, H. H., Jr., 1997. Additional fiber measurements being evaluated. Proceedings of the Tenth Engineered Fiber Selection Conference.

Ramey, H. H., Jr., 1998. HVI measurements of short fiber content. Proceedings of the 1998 Beltwide Cotton Conferences.