Today, paper companies are pushing high-speed manufacturing lines in an effort to maximise product output. Equipment is often pushed to or past designed operational speeds in an effort to meet production goals. The desired results are often difficult to achieve due to breaks in the web that create lengthy downtime periods.
A typical manufacturer in the paper industry must address the following questions:
* Does the manufacturing of paper products run without defects or excessive material waste?
* Are manufacturing lines achieving production goals (desired run rate, minimum down time)?
* Do production processes (flying splice, trim squirts, headbox, formers and other areas) run without manufacturing problems?
Paper manufacturing engineers and line operators are often faced with high-speed manufacturing lines that are down or producing faulty paper, often at great expense to their company. A web break that causes 20 min of downtime on a 9 m wide web (typically runs at 1400 m/min) can result in approximately 608 000 square metres of lost paper productivity. In an effort to see what causes web breaks most paper manufacturers have installed video cameras to monitor the web at the wet end, flying splice and other problem areas. The video camera pictures are often of little or no value since they are acquiring pictures at only 25 or 50 pictures per second. Web breaks are simply too fast for these cameras, often capturing only one picture of the failure. There is not enough picture information to help the engineers and operators observe failure dynamics. Engineers and operators can spend significant time and money trying to solve these costly unseen problems.
The Redlake MASD MotionScope high-speed camera systems provide an easy method for observing high-speed web breaks and mechanical processes under real production situations. The high-speed pictures (record rates up to 8000 frames per second) can be instantly played back in slow motion or on a frame-by-frame basis to allow the observer to see, measure, and understand the fast mechanical motions that are causing the manufacturing problems. The MotionScope systems are designed as PC based products that easily connect to a standard 100 Mbps Ethernet network.
Designed to capture random events
With MotionScope in the record mode, signals from two web-break detectors creates a trigger signal (confirmed web break) that is received by the MotionScope system network and the recording process is stopped. Slow-motion pictures of the event are ready for playback and analysis, providing vital instant feedback on what went wrong and which measures have to be taken to correct the problem. This is an example of how the use of high-speed imaging can reduce manufacturing costs and increase profitability by helping to reduce line downtime, reduce waste, improve yield and improve product quality by providing visual information of high-speed events that are too fast for the human eye to see.
Westplex is the distributor of Redlake MASD products in South Africa.
| Tel: | +27 11 787 0473 |
| Email: | [email protected] |
| www: | www.westplex.co.za |
| Articles: | More information and articles about Westplex |
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