Cristini Announces First Portable Felt Moisture, Permeability Meter

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Cristini Diagnostic Systems, Italy, has introduced PermFlowDUO™ as the world’s first portable instrument to integrate (in the same unit) a sophisticated microwave meter, a water permeability meter, and a temperature sensor. The unit is designed to monitor paper machine press section clothing performance.

Cristini notes that monitoring press section clothing is essential to ensure that the paper machine runs at the best efficiency and quality, with the lowest emissions. Until now, it adds, the only way to monitor moisture and water permeability in press fabrics was by using two separate instruments. For the operator, this required twice the number of accesses to paper machine positions (impacting safety) and twice the time for scans. It also reduced reliability of the measurements, since the scan of moisture and water permeability were not conducted in the same position at the same time.

With the PermFlowDUO, the company explains, the simultaneous scan of moisture, permeability, and temperature greatly improves safety and accuracy, while reducing the time for scans, stress on the operator, and, last but not least, investment, maintenance, and transportation costs. The simultaneous reading at a high sampling rate allows the production of unique and accurate on-board 3D maps of the felt moisture and permeability. The 3D map felt scan does not require any sensor positioning device, and can be sampled during the normal cross-machine-direction scans by the on-board processor. A full 3D felt scan with good resolution normally requires only two minutes.

The instrument is provided with a full color range trigger (more precise and sensitive than the standard infrared triggers), to synchronize the scans with the felt revolutions. The sampling rate up to 2.5 times faster than standard meters allows not only better accuracy, but also a reliable, high resolution, on-board FFT analysis to predict possible press roll vibrations.

The instrument’s calibration curves allow accurate alignment of both readings with previous instruments and existing meters. An algorithm highlights, on the instrument screen, felt areas that are clogged or worn out, to help the papermaker better plan felt changes and felt cleaning intervals, according to Cristini. The instrument does not require a PC to export data. Instead, data are downloaded on common USB mass storage devices in .txt, xls, and custom formats, compatible with the most commonly used data analysis and reporting PC software. All of the on-board functions are duplicated on the supplied PC database/analysis software.

 More information is available online.