Effects of Drying Heat and Gin Additives on Sticky Cotton

Pima cotton that had been contaminated by honeydew from whitefly was treated during seed cotton processing by both controlled heating and oversprays. Under certain conditions, both heating and oversprays enabled small lots of sticky cotton to be roller ginned at normal throughput rules. However, the heating and overspray treatments did not improve textile processing. None of the treatments could be carded at the target rate of 27.2 kg/h (60 lb/h) even after blending 50/50 with nonsticky cotton or increasing the amount of overspray on the fiber. Further research is yet needed in this area.