(Honeywell: Helsinki) -- Honeywell has released Precision FotoFiber, a fiber orientation-angle sensor that helps paper and board makers improve overall product quality, while reducing waste and lowering production costs. The sensor—ideal for manufacturing large product runs of newsprint, fine paper, containerboard, and folding boxboard—minimizes the need for manual monitoring by mill personnel. Its camera and powerful illumination technology automatically adjust to varying machine speeds and sheet surface characteristics to capture high-quality sheet surface images.

This automated approach helps reduce variations in web fiber orientation profiles, which can cause a range of imperfections in paper and board products such as stack-lean or paper jams in sheet-fed devices, missing color registration in color printing, twisting in multilayer board, and weakened corrugated container board. The sensor allows mill personnel to electronically monitor fiber orientation throughout the entire production process, alerting supervisors immediately if a product deviates from standards.

“Precision FotoFiber represents a breakthrough in high-speed image analysis in the paper and board industry, because it saves paper and board makers time and money,” says Andrew Hird, Honeywell’s global director for pulp, paper, printing, and CWS. “It maximizes staff productivity by reducing the need for laboratory analysis of fiber orientation profiles, it minimizes time needed for corrective action when flaws are detected, and it ultimately results in a higher quality product with less waste. It provides an entirely new method for diagnosing process problems.”

Supporting speeds up to 2,000 m/min., Precision FotoFiber uses a built-in image control unit to manage camera and illumination pulse intensity and length. The full distribution of fiber angles is computed from each image, so that the average fiber angle and the surface anisotropy are measured.

For more information regarding Precision FotoFiber, please visit www.honeywell.com/ps.