The cornmonly used Micronaire value for cotton is related to both fibre fineness and maturity. There is a need for a new measurement technique to separate these. This is of particular importance to the Australian industry where varieties of fine, mature cotton have the potential to be wrongfully discounted commercially by misinterpreting a low Micronaire value as indicating immaturity in a coarser fibre.

A preliminary CRDC funded project (CRDC Project CSWTIC), demonstrated that the Sirolan-Laserscan, in a novel mode of operation, is able to measure the fineness of cotton fibres independent of fibre maturity.

Following this, a paper on the preliminary results of the technique was presented to the USA

Beltwide meeting in January 1999 and also Dr Geoff Naylor visited and had in-depth

discussions with the other key researchers in this area at the USDA in New Orleans (CRDC

Project CSWT 2C). The main outcome was that there is general agreement that the new

Sirolan-Laserscan approach has significant potential as a viable technique for measuring

cotton fibre fineness. Further, it is thought that it might easily be possible to extend the

approach to yield fibre maturity information by combining the results from this approach with the current micronaire measurement.