Textile Ginning | Ginning

Ginning Process

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Nearly all cotton is stored in modules, which look like giant loaves of bread. Modules allow the cotton to be stored without loosing yield or quality prior to ginning. Specially designed trucks pick up modules of seed cotton from the field and move them to the gin. Modern gins place modules in front of machines called module feeders. Some module feeders have stationary heads, in which case, giant conveyors move the modules into the module feeder. Other module feeders are self-propelled and move down a track that along side the modules. The module feeders literally break the modules apart and "feed" the seed cotton into the gin.

Other gins use powerful pipes to suck the cotton into the gin building. Once in the cotton gin, the seed cotton moves through dryers and through cleaning machines that remove the gin waste such as burs, dirt, stems and leaf material from the cotton. Then it goes to the gin stand where circular saws with small, sharp teeth pluck the fiber from the seed.

From the gin, fiber and seed go different ways. The ginned fiber, now called lint, is pressed together and made into dense bales weighting about 500 pounds. To determine the value ofcotton, samples are taken from each bale and classed according to fiber length (staple), strength, micronaire, color and cleanness. Producers usually sell their cotton to a local buyer or merchant who, in turn, sells it to a textile mill either in the United States or a foreign country.

The seed usually is sold by the producer to the gin. The ginner either sells for feed or to an oil mill where the linters (downy fuzz) are removed in an operation very much like ginning. Linters are baled and sold to the paper, batting and plastics industries, while the seed is processed into cottonseed oil, meal and hulls.

Types of Gins

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Previous to the introduction of Modern Machinery, ginning was performed by hand or by machines of a primitive character such as the "Foot Roller" and its improvement the "Churka".

As the cotton industry developed, greater production than these were capable of was necessary, and machines driven by power were introduced. Numerous forms of gins have been tried, but at the present time only three are used to any large extent. They are

1. Knife Roller Gin

2. Saw Gin

3. Three Types Of Macarthy Gins

i. Single acting Macarthy Gin.
ii. Double acting Macarthy Gin
iii. Double roller Macarthy Gin.

Overview of Ginning

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Ginning is the process of separating the cotton fibers from the cotton seeds. Perfect ginning operation would be performed if the separation of fibers from seed was effected without the slightest injury to either seeds or to the fiber.

A cotton gin is a machine that quickly and easily separates the cotton fibers from the seeds, a job previously done by hand. These seeds are either used again to grow more cotton or, if badly damaged, are disposed of. It uses a combination of a wire screen and small wire hooks to pull the cotton through the screen, while brushes continuously remove the loose cotton lint to prevent jams. The term "gin" is an abbreviation for engine, and means "machine".

History of Ginning

The gin method for seeding cotton can be traced back as far as the first century AD. The earliest versions consisted of a single roller made of iron or wood and a flat piece of stone or wood. Evidence for this type of gin has been found in Africa, Asia, and North America. The first documentation of the cotton gin by contemporary scholars is found in the fifth century AD. Visual evidence of the single-roller gin exists in the form of fifth-century Buddhist paintings in the Ajanta Caves in western India. These early gins were difficult to use and required a great deal of skill. A narrow single roller was necessary to expel the seeds from the cotton without crushing the seeds. The design was similar to that of a metate, which was used to grind grain. The earliest history of the cotton gin is ambiguous due to the fact that archeologists likely mistook the cotton gin's parts for other tools.

Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, dual roller gins appeared in India and China. The Indian version of the two roller gin was prevalent throughout the Mediterranean cotton trade by the sixteenth century. This mechanical device was, in some areas, driven by water power.

The modern cotton gin was created by the American inventor Eli Whitney in 1793 to mechanize the cleaning of cotton. The invention was granted a patent on March 14, 1794.

Many people attempted to develop a design that would process short staple cotton and Hodgen Holmes, Robert Watkins, William Longstreet, and John Murray were all issued patents for improvement to the cotton gin by 1796. However, the evidence indicates that Whitney did invent the saw gin, for which he is famous.