The ITMF International Committee on Cotton Testing Methods (ICCTM) gave full recognition at its meeting in Bremen, Germany to CottonScope, a fiber-testing instrument developed by the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The ICCTM met on Monday, March 19, 2018 at the start of the International Cotton Conference Bremen 2018.
CottonScope measures fineness, maturity, ribbon width and micronaire of cotton fiber. The instrument will be used for low volume classification, quality assurance by breeders, ginners, spinners, and by industrial researchers. It is common practice to infer fiber fineness and maturity concomitantly from measures of micronaire. The difficulty is that fineness and maturity are correlated, resulting in inaccurate inferences, and two samples with the same micronaire value can vary significantly. In contrast, CottonScope provides independent measures of fineness, maturity and micronaire, thus enabling improvements in textile quality and processing efficiency.
CottonScope works by cutting cotton fibers into snippets which are weighed, dropped into a water-filled bowl and dispersed randomly. Color digital images of the snippets are analyzed by proprietary software to determine parameter values.
The recognition of CottonScope by ICCTM demonstrates the efficacy of the instrument as judged by some of the leading fiber technology scientists and engineers in the world. Recognition is conferred on instruments and testing methods after rigorous technical and statistical analysis following procedures developed by the ICCTM.
