This project arose from the 'Fibre Plus' workshops at Narrabri coordinated by both the Cotton CRC and the CRDC. These meetings identified the need to establish a standardised facility in Australia (a) to process small batches of cotton through the textile pipeline to knitted and woven samples and then (b) to analyse final fabric quality. This facility would be a valuable tool for post-harvest cotton research and in particular be valuable to the CRDC funded project at The National Centre for

Engineering in Agriculture (NCEA) in Toowoomba.

In a previous project (CRC project CRC28C) in this area, work at CSlRO was undertaken to produce a computer system for analysing the quality of dyed fabrics. This project was not entirely successful due to problems with the computer software purchased from the USA. The work has however identified an opportunity for evaluating the quality of dyed yarn rather than fabric, and this became the subject of the present project. Further the CRC project resulted in a large data base of samples (yarns and dyed fabrics) together with subjective visual assessments of white specks in the dyed fabric samples. This data base and samples form a critical set for testing the validity of the new approach.

The approach of analysing dyed yarn rather than fabric is attractive on two counts. Firstly it eliminates the need to produce fabric and so is in principle a more efficient and quicker approach. Secondly the approach of automatically testing yarns will mean that a range of different cones from the one batch of yarn can be quickly tested and thus the approach should lead to a more accurate result than is possible from an analysis of small fabric samples.