Effect of slack mercerization and tension mercerization on the breaking load distribution of cotton fibers

Abstract

It has been shown that the breaking load histograms of raw, slack-mercerized, and mercerized-stretched cottons can be represented by β-distributions. The breaking load distribution is positively skewed for raw cotton. The influence of slack mercerization is to make the distributions symmetric and to reduce the variability of the breaking load by the elimination of weak links. The mode of the distribution shifts toward higher breaking load upon mercerization, and this shift increases with the extent of applied stretch. For various raw and mercerized cottons, the effect of increasing the gauge length is to reduce the mean, mode, and variability of the breaking load and to make the distributions less and less asymmetric. The application of stretch to swollen fibers influences the load distribution on the side of higher load and renders the distribution asymmetric.