Yarn Science (or Engineering)

Here I am at work, reading the technical program for the IEEE Sensors 2008 conference, when one of the papers jumps out at me:

Automatic Yarn Characterization System

Surely my eyes deceive me, "Yarn" should be "YARN", an acronym or something. But no:

"This paper presents an innovative, low cost, portable and high-precision yarn evaluation tester, entitled YSQ (Yarn System Quality), for quality control of yarn characteristics under laboratory conditions. It presents a modular format, which can integrate simultaneously yarn hairiness, mass, regularity and diameter measurements. The quantification of yarn hairiness and diameter variation (with a sampling resolution length of 1 mm), is carried out using photodiodes; the diameter characterization, based on samples with of 0.5 mm width, uses a linear photodiode array; the measurements of mass variation, based on samples of 1 mm, employs a parallel plates capacitive sensor. In the YSQ measurement parameters based on optical sensors, a coherent signal processing technique with Fourier analysis is used, to obtain a linear and consistent output signal variations. A comparison between results of the YSQ and a commercially available solution is presented."

Apparently Vitor Carvalho of Universidade do Minho, Portugal, and his colleagues have been working on this problem for a few years. There's a 2006 paper up on IEEE Xplore if you have access.