A Study On Cotton Fiber Properties And Their Influence On The Microstructural Characteristics Of Mercerized Fibers By Regression Analysis

The quality of textile products initially depends on the quality of the raw material i.e.fibre.In China,most of the textile industries are cotton based.The overall quality of cotton fiber depends on factors like strength,elongation,fineness,length,short fiber content etc.Since cotton is a natural fibre,it has a lot of unevenness in its properties.The determination of quality value of cotton raw material is basically a multi-criteria decision making problem.It is a decision of calculated importance.In most of the cases,the decision for the nature of raw material selection is very unstructured and crude.Therefore,there is a need to solve such kind of intricate problems by science techniques which might be useful in spinning industry.The inability of common decision making methods to handle imprecision and uncertainty,a method has been used which involves a linear correlation regression analysis between physical properties and microstructural properties.In order to promote the development of world's cotton spinning industry,a study is conducted at raw material imported from several countries to save the time in the selection of raw material used in the cotton spinning industry and to improve the quality of the cotton spinning by examining physical properties of cotton fibers in detail,studying mercerized microstructural properties and exploring the relationship between cotton fibers microstructure and physical properties.For this study different cotton fibers were selected from different ecological regions.The cotton fibers were processed in the mercerization process.HVI(high volume instrument)study involves the testing for evaluating of physical properties of cotton fibers which include indicators;short fiber content,tensile strength,elongation at break,micronaire value and upper half mean length.Xinjiang-Cn,BG-Au and BG-Tu samples exhibit relatively better physical properties.Several region cotton fiber samples were mercerized with sodium hydroxide,XRD,FTIR and SEM was used for analysis of internal structure and surface morphology.A change in fiber strength,degree of crystallinity and degree of orientation of cotton fibers before and after mercerization has been examined.SEM results show that surface of cotton fibers become smooth and shiny after the treatment,FTIR and XRD reveals that chemical composition doesn't change but degree of crystallinity decreased and degree of orientation of alkalized cotton fibers increased after mercerization.In second phase of this study,through physical properties of cotton fibers and microstructural properties of alkalized cotton samples a correlation analysis is made between them which reveal that the breaking strength of cotton fibers is strongly negatively correlated with the crystallinity of cotton fibers.Higher the tensile strength lower will be the crystallinity of cotton fibers which leads to better mechanical properties of end product.Degree of orientation of cotton fibers is highly correlated with tensile strength of cotton fibers,BG-Au,BG-Tu and Pakistan samples have higher values of tensile strength and lower values of yellowness;the raw material from these samples can be preferred according to correlation analysis.Correlation analysis between physical properties reveals that tensile strength of cotton fibers is positive correlated with micronaire value but the correlation is not strong due to lower value of correlation coefficient as 0.4809.