Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Fiber Length Comparisons of Various Cottons

Fiber length is one of the most important physical properties of cotton. Frequently, it is necessary to compare the fiber lengths of various cottons. The commonly used statistical characteristics of a cotton fiber length distribution include the mean fiber length, short fiber content, and upper quartile length. These statistics may be calculated from number-based or weight-based distributions. This paper shows theoretically and experimentally that number-based and weight-based statistics may give opposite rank orders in some cases when they are used to compare cotton fiber lengths.