ABSTRACT

From the time a cotton is harvested, a series of opening and cleaning mechanisms are applied, both before and after ginning. This sequence is continued in the textile mill as part of preparation for spinning. Opening and cleaning principles and machinery employed in the gin and mill are sufficiently similar to allow for a unified description of the cotton cleaning process. In the present work, a mathematical framework is proposed for describing cotton cleanability as a trade-off between the reduction of foreign matter on the one hand, and the mechanical damage which must necessarily be inflicted upon the cotton to achieve the cleaning. It is shown that if indices of cleaning and damage are appropriately defined, then cleaning can be modeled as an extinction process and damage can be viewed as a saturation process. More importantly, the trade-off between cleaning and damage can be shown to have certain systematic features which can be utilized to assess the processability of a cotton and to predict optimum processing strategies. One significant feature of this analysis is that it demonstrates how a cotton's processing history influences its Performance in downstream operations.