Domestic textile manufacturing has suffered a sad fate over the course of the last 15 years and competition with imported products has reduced capacity in the U.S. textile and apparel sectors, and the domestic textile industry no longer consumes the majority of the cotton produced in the United States. However, the nonwovens sector of the textiles industry is alive, healthy, and growing. In fact, this industry has grown by an annual average of 7 percent from 2003 to 2006, totaling 20.5 million bales (500 lbs.) of fiber, globally, and an annual average of 5.6 percent from 2003 to 2006, totaling 5.2 million bales of fiber, domestically. Nonwoven fabrics are broadly defined as sheet or web structures bonded together by entangling fiber or filaments mechanically by the use of needles (needlepunching) or by the use of high pressure water jets (hydroentangling). The majority of the fibers used in this industry, however, are manmade polymers such as polypropylene and polyester and cellulose-based manufactured fibers such as viscose and lyocell. Most of the cotton used in the nonwovens industry, albeit a very small amount, is bleached cotton fiber, which carries the burden of being both very costly and extremely difficult to manufacture due to poor processing characteristics. Understanding the need for improved cotton processing techniques, Wildwood Gin has discovered and perfected the technology to clean virgin bales of lint cotton to unprecedented levels of purity. Consequently, many nonwovens manufacturers began using their cotton product, trademarked UltraClean, for their various nonwoven products. The research in this proposal will be to quantify the effects that different fiber characteristics have on both the processing characteristics in the UltraClean and hydroentangling manufacturing line and on the performance of the finished nonwoven fabric. The data collected in this research will be used to better understand virgin cotton in nonwoven manufacturing lines and furnish nonwoven manufacturers with this information. The fiber data analyzed could help facilitate the engineering of a new cotton variety tailored specifically to nonwovens end uses. The production of this new fiber could decrease costs and increase yields exponentially for the American farmer. OBJECTIVES: The goal of phase I of this project will be to collect data gathered from producing different nonwoven substrates out of Wildwood Gin's revolutionary new unbleached cotton product, UltraClean. The data collected will help us understand which fiber types perform best in nonwoven fabrics such as baby wipes, household wipes, and medical fabrics. We will also compare each cotton nonwoven fabric's performance to the performance of similar manufactured wipes that are currently being sold on store shelves throughout the world. The data collected will also be instrumental in helping nonwoven manufacturers solve the existing problems with producing nonwoven fabrics containing high percentages of cotton. Each stage of this phase will be monitored closely and data will be collected from, including testing of fiber throughout the UltraClean manufacturing stage and hydroentanglement stage along with monitoring each machine's performance. This will help us better understand cotton's machining qualities in regard to fiber type and overall process-ability. Wildwood Gin and the USDA-SRRC have already developed a CRADA and are in the process of moving UltraClean into the nonwovens market with unprecedented success in our horizon. The fabric and machining data collected in this phase will be crucial to the increase of cotton's current use in nonwovens, which stood at a paltry .05 percent of global nonwoven production in 2009. Companies such as Procter and Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, 3M, and Clorox have developed sustainable fiber intiatives in the last few years and the time could not be more suited for large-volume market penetration of a commodity that stands in the face of losing its infrastructure in this country. UltraClean is made of 100 percent US cotton, requires no chemicals or water to purify, and will replace non-biodegradable plastic with an annually renewable and biodegradable American crop. Great interest has already been shown by several household-name companies that have begun product development. The expected outputs will be penetrating a new market for US cotton. The fiber data will be analyzed and sent to breeders and geneticists in Phase II to begin identifying cotton varieties that would be best suited for use in nonwoven fabrics. Everyone involved in this project believes that our analysis will conclude that the traditional textile concern for cotton characteristics will be negligible for the nonwoven industry. This could potentially lead to new, extremely high-yielding cotton plants that produce fiber with no human intervention encouraging high length and premium micronaire, which are the two prominent factors linked to low yield and low tolerance to drought and disease
