COTTON MASS FLOW MEASUREMENT: EXPERIMENTS WITH TWO OPTICAL DEVICES

Abstract

Mass flow measurement of pneumatically conveyed cotton is important in at least two processes: yieldmonitoring during harvesting, and input and output determinations at various stages of ginning. In this work, twoexperimental devices were constructed and tested for measuring the flow of pneumatically conveyed cotton. One(device A) was used to collect data in the seed-cotton unloading duct of a gin, a cotton picker duct, and a lint-cleaner-wasteduct. The other (device B) was used to collect data in the seed-cotton unloading duct of a gin and a lint-cleaner-wasteduct. Tests were conducted in which known amounts of cotton were conveyed through the duct over a known timeperiod, making it possible to calculate the average actual material flow rate. The average output of each device during thetest runs was also calculated. Actual flow rate was compared to measured flow rate with linear regression. For seedcotton in the unloading duct, both devices performed well. For seed cotton in the picker chute, device A performed well,but device B was not tested. For waste in the lint-cleaner-waste duct, device A performed well and better than device B. Inmost cases, the correlation between sensor output and cotton mass flow was strong. Both devices look promising forapplication in appropriate locations in a cotton picker or gin.