Air-Bar cotton Lint Cleaner

Abstract

Saw-type lint cleaners are now the most common lint cleaners used at gins because of their higher cleaning efficiency. Saw-type lint cleaning improves the grade of the fiber and increases the market value for the farmer. However, during the cleaning process the saw-type lint cleaners damage fiber in creating short fibers and neps. An innovative air-bar lint cleaner (ABLC) was designed and built. The ABLC used pressurized air to clean non-lint materials from cotton fiber while the cotton fiber batt was on a rotating saw cylinder. Thus, non-lint materials attached to the fiber were removed by the interaction of blowing force of compressed airflow and centrifugal force created by the rotating cylinder without the fiber making mechanical contact with a solid object, such as a grid bar. The fiber quality could be preserved by reducing the damage from mechanical impact of the fiber against the grid bar during the lint cleaning process. Preliminary testing of the ABLC prototype was conducted. Compared with cotton cleaned using the conventional saw-type lint cleaner, cotton cleaned using the ABLC had better fiber quality properties, including less short fiber content, less trash content, longer fiber length by number, less immature fiber content, lower yellowness, and less lint content in the lint waste.