One aspect of the desire to improve the quality of the Australian cotton crop is to introduce new fibre quality instrumentation to supplement the current Mircronaire measurement. In previous CRDC funded projects, CSIRO has developed the Cottonscan instrumentation to directly measure the average fibre fineness or linear density of a cotton sample. Recently BSC Electronics have been licensed to commercialise the Cottonscan technology by intergrating both the Cottonscan and SiroMat technologies into an updated version of their commercailly available Cottonscope instrument, i.e Cottonscope Mark 2.

This one year small project was designed to enable CSIRO to provide, as required, technical and technical-marketing support to BSC Electronics during the technology transfer phase and early commercialisation of the Cottonscan/Cottonscope technology.

The project has been succcessful. Trials comparing Cottonscope test results with reference cross-section test data show good, clear relationships. Importantly the project has successfully resolved an important technical issue with the precision of the Cottonscope data which had potential, if not resolved, to significantly impact negatively on the future of the technology.

Strategically a number of scientific papers, technical reports and trade presentations have been prepared and presented as technical marketing support for the technology.

Finally, Cottonscope instruments are now located and operating at CSIRO in Belmont and Narrabri; the USDA in New Orleans, USA; Texas Tech University in Lubbock TX, USA; and Dai Chung Textiles Ltd., Guangdong, China.