The Demo Site

Cotton Incorporated’s Engineered Fiber Selection^® (EFS^® System) has earned the reputation of providing mills and merchants with the ability to rapidly process massive quantities of High Volume Instrument (HVI) data. This feature enables cotton to be selected so that all-important HVI measurements can be taken into account through the active control of averages, and statistical distributions of selected inventories of cotton bales.

Such control is economically important because cotton cost and related mill qualities, as well as processing efficiencies and associated costs, can be positively affected when cotton is acquired and used with the benefit of HVI data. The growers of U.S. cotton recognized in the early 1980 are the value of HVI data to themselves and to their mill customers. Their support led to the USDA’s undertaking the universal HVI classing program. To date, only the U.S. offers cotton on the world market that has been HVI classed in state-of-the-art facilities. The rooms containing the HVI lines and samples are air conditioned to tightly controlled temperature and humidity specifications. Cotton samples to be tested are then fully conditioned within this environment and tested on HVI lines that have been properly calibrated using USDA calibration cotton samples to insure the consistent testing results.

DETERMINATION OF COTTON SPECIFICATIONS

Cotton specifications are a function of end-product performance expectations and the machinery complement, including process flow design and related maintenance, settings, production rates, and the management philosophy of a given mill. The importance of understanding the technical requirements of cotton to overall profitability cannot be overemphasized. It has been demonstrated over the years that mills that buy cotton solely based on price and without regard for mill and product needs are not likely to be able to compete effectively in their markets long-term.

Specifications of the end-product should be determined and allocated into needed cotton attributes and intermediate product and machinery performance requirements. Various quality control reports and charts can be assembled to support this aspect of cotton management. Among other things, fabric quality measurements such as appearance, tensile, tear or burst strength, seconds, efficiencies, etc., of each process should be collected and analyzed on a daily basis. The control charts provided by the EFS^® - MILL Net program can be used to assist the appropriate manager in determining which process/product variables are correlated to cotton HVI measured properties.

Once such correlations are understood, then cotton purchasing can be conducted with a technical perspective that will likely ensure the purchase of cotton using HVI data with a profile that leads to improved mill and product performance. Depending on the customer’s relationships with his or her U.S. cotton suppliers, and willingness to pay a premium for this service, it may be possible to have the merchant supply HVI data on cotton the merchant wishes to offer for sale.

Orienting or controlling nanofibers means arraying them in a particular configuration: in parallel, in a circle, or crossed. The fibers that form the cartilage that protects the knee are aligned in parallel. Orienting collagen nanofibers is an extremely complex task because collagen is a natural polymer that is very difficult to control. Camila Flor, a student at the ETSEIAT (UPC), has achieved this using the electrospinning method.

How to manufacture synthetic cartilage

Until now, creating synthetic cartilage was complex but not impossible. The problem was that it was impossible to imitate the perfection of human cartilage due to the difficulty in orienting the collagen Nan fibers; synthetic cartilage was therefore manufactured using gelatinous substances derived from collagen.

The process for creating synthetic cartilage began with processing stem cells. These cells, if processed in the right way, reproduce and transform into any type of cell required by the scientist manipulating them. For this to be possible, the cells must be in an ideal environment. The work carried out by Camilla Floor means that the collagen fibers adapt to the configuration of the chondrocytes (cartilage cells) and are made in the ideal environment, in which these chondrocytes grow until they form the desired cartilage.

A Cornell University macro project

The work by Camilla Floor is the result of a final thesis supervised by Dr. Juan Hinestroza of Cornell University, USA, with contributions from Dr. Arun Naik of the UPC's Institute of Textile Research and Industrial Cooperation at the Terrassa Campus, and was carried out within the textile specialization of the Industrial Engineering degree.

* The project is entitled "A Study of the Formation of Collagen Nanofibers using Electrospinning." Camila Flor has dedicated months of research and study to the work, which is part of a macroproject, the objective of which is to manufacture synthetic cartilage for medical uses, such as knee protection for patients with protheses. The project, funded by the Morgan Family Tissue Engineering Fund, is being carried out by the laboratory run by the lecturer and researcher Dr. Juan Hinestroza of Cornell University, USA, and is coordinated by Dr. Ryan Kurby and Dr. Margaret Frey . Two US students—a postdoctoral student and a doctoral student—are taking part in the project by carrying out research on stem cells and the manipulation of different types of polymers. Camila Flor, who recently graduated from the ETSEIAT, has managed to orient collagen fibers—a key step that will allow the project to move forward. The next step of the project will be to create the structure obtained by the UPC student in three dimensions so that work can begin on manufacturing cartilage.