Variability in Fineness Parameter of Agave Americana L. Fiber “Intra-Plant Study”

The aim of this paper is to study the botanical causes (age of plant, maturity of fibers) leading to the variability in fineness parameter for plant fibers, particularly agave Americana L. fiber. The Design of experiment DoE techniques, and other statistical analyses are used by varying the factors of interest in a full factorial design to assess the main effects and the interactions of some factors influencing the fiber fineness. In this work, which represents an intra plant study, fibers are taken from different parts of a same plant, and many controlling factors were considered namely the leaf age (position of the leaf in the plant) and the fiber maturity (position of fibers within the leaf). The output parameters are the fineness and the mean ‘equivalent’ diameter.The main results show that fibers taken from different leaves at the same level of a plant have approximately much close properties. However, fibers located at different positions in the leaf itself (tip, middle or base) exhibit different properties. Besides, fibers belonging to inferior levels of the plant (oldest leaves) have different properties compared to those selected from the top of the plant (youngest leaves). The 2-order interactions have negligible effect on fineness and diameter parameters.