Surface Topography

Monitoring the surface topography of webs (e.g. paper) or metals (e.g. slab) is vital in many manufacturing applications in order to detect errors and to ensure appropriate quality control. Early detection of flaws in the surface can help to fix problems right away during the process, and hence reduce the amount of scrap that would otherwise appear. Real-time monitoring can thus be a valuable asset in paper, metal and process industries. Traditionally, vision based monitoring meets special challenges whenever processes are running at high speed or they contain hot objects. Due to the high speed of many industrial webs, like in paper manufacturing, motion blur is seriously limiting the detection of small flaws. On the other hand, processes with hot objects, such as in hot metal rolling in foundries, can hide valuable information behind the glow of the material. CAVILUX lasers can generate short pulses of high power and high spectral brightness which typically eliminates all problems related to motion blur or disturbing thermal light from the hot object. As a result, fast and/or hot webs can be monitored reliably, enabling fast error detection and reduced amount of scrap.