Cotton Seed Distributors - Web on Wednesday

Reducing Neps 

Dr. Stuart Gordon - CSIRO textile division - discusses cotton fibre research projects and the impact of neps.

Stuart could you just firstly define Neps?

Well there are a number of different issues in Neps but the main one is that it’s an entanglement of fibres with a hard nucleus so that the entanglement occurs around a hard nucleus and that hard nucleus maybe fibre or it may be a seed coat fragment or it may be some other contaminant.

Could it be said that it’s linked to immature fibres or has that got any impact on it?

That’s very true. Studies have shown that over 90% of the fibres in a Nep are immature, so precluding immature fibres from our cotton is obviously a priority in that regard.

And would you say it’s becoming a bigger issue as far as our cotton competing in the world market?

Yes probably, there are a number of growths around the world that have lower Nep levels and this has been measured in studies that we’ve done and as a result of those studies it has become apparent that reducing the Nep level is a critical issue.

The ginning process – what impact does that have on Neps and the process of ginning?

Well by and large all mechanical processes will affect the level of Nep in cotton and what we see is that Australian cotton has some susceptibility to Nepping, that is it has some immature fibre faction in it and we now need to manage that and in doing that, at our level we are looking primarily at the gin and the lint cleaner in particular.

Can Neps be measured prior to ginning?

It’s difficult to measure them in seed cotton and it’s difficult to withdraw samples in the pre-cleaning or at the gin stand. You can measure it but it’s a little bit academic, I don’t think it’s a process available to check your ginning settings. I think what needs to happen is that we need to experiment and we need to particularly look at the lint cleaner. The lint cleaner is where around 70% of the Neps occur so that’s our prime focus at the moment as well.

What actual research are you doing as far as reducing the impact of lint cleaning and that on Neps?

Well we have a two-pronged attack. We’re looking at defining maturity and measuring it directly so that we’re not limited to a micronaire measurement, which measures maturity but it measures a combination of fineness and maturity so we want to distinguish between those two parameters. We’ve developed some instrumentation that will allow us to do that; one of them the CSIROmet, which measures an average and distribution of maturity and is a low volume instrument and the other is the cotton scan, which is a high volume instrument measurement of fineness and when married with micronaire extracts the measure of maturity. We also have a program looking at the material flow through the lint cleaner because this is where the Nepping is created and we’re looking at re-engineering the lint cleaner at this point and we’ve had some success in that area.

Looking at the world situation Stuart, what is the perception of Australian cotton as far as Nep levels go?

They’re a bit high and the mill survey that we’ve just conducted said they were high despite the fact that we were also recording high micronaire levels over the last two to three years, so high micronaire tends to mitigate the Nepping effect but we recorded during the survey that spinners were still nominating Neps and high micronaire as the main adverse properties of Australian cotton, so their impression is that it’s still too high.

Australia has an opportunity to reduce those Nep levels if we did do the work and get it to an acceptable level would other countries soon follow along?

They would but I think we have an advantage in that the IP that we are using here is generated by CSIRO and the CRDC so that it’s ours to use first, so hopefully we’re a step ahead in terms of the tools we will use in terms of the instruments and the ginning technology that we will apply.

And finally Stuart, if growers or ginners or marketers want to get more information on your program and what you are doing and any follow up information, how do they go about that?

They can contact me directly. We are very happy to hear from growers and traders alike, ginners at CSIRO.