Technical Note: Predicting Cotton Stelometer Fiber Strength by Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy

Abstract

The strength of cotton fibers is one of several important end-use characteristics. In routine programs, it has been mostly assessed by automation-oriented high volume instrument (HVI) system. An alternative method for cotton strength is near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy. Although previous NIR models have been promising in the prediction of HVI strength, in the latest research we have reported a much improved NIR model for HVI strength with a proposal of applying the pre-screening procedure to determine appropriate calibration samples. As a different and complementary approach, the present study was involved with partial least squares (PLS) analysis on mid-infrared (IR) spectra and cotton Stelometer strength. The model performance from the 1800 to 800 cm-1 IR region was nearly equivalent to that from the full 3600 to 600 cm-1 region. Considering the heterogeneous distribution of strength in native fibers and different sampling spotsbetween IR spectral and reference measurement, a 90% confidence interval was applied to exclude outlier samples from the calibration and validation sets. The recalibrated model revealed the feasibility of the IR technique for the quantitative determination of cotton Stelometer strength. Of most interest is that the capability of IR model for Stelometer strength is in good agreement with the NIR model for HVI strength.