Australian Merino Wool Grease Staple Powerful Impact Study

As the further study on wool fiber and the improvement about the requirement of wool product, people have attached more and more importance to the wool staple strength testing. There are almost 85% wool used to auction which supervised by AWEX (Australia Wool Exchange) in Australia. The on sale wool needs to be examined by special organization (Australia wool testing authority Ltd.) and after testing will issue an IWTO TEST CERTIFICATE and report. The testing include wool fiber diameter(FD),vegetable matter,staple length(SL) and staple strength(SS) and so on.Staple strength is the second key characteristic besides fiber diameter, the auction price will influenced by SS. SS can be used in Hauteur prediction and noil percentage. In commercial testing, the testing object is greasy wool, namely raw wool without any treatment. The author considers that SS with no-grease maybe reflecting the strength of the wool fibers more accurately. In this study, the effect of grease on wool SS was examined.The main method of this study is the comparable experiment, two wool fleeces were collected from the Gordon Institute of TAFE, VIC. Australia, one is fine wool and another is coarse wool. The experiment used neutral detergent and organic solvent, compared SS with the two scour methods. Another comparable experiment was the change of SS before and after washing. Use SEM to check the washing effect and FTIR-ATR to observe the changes of the surface element of wool fiber.The study result indicates that grease content (GC) has evident influence on SS (r=-0.796), at the same time, the cleaning extent of the two scour method weredifferent, organic solvent has poor effect on removing dust.The study is a primary research which result not only has active significant onqualitative analysis and made good preparation for the later research but also providea reference to AWTA on testing SS for more accurately assessment of woolperformance.