Vision solutions are commonplace in paper manufacturing facilities. Over the past 40 years, cameras and sensors have been installed above calender rolls. Most provide basic monitoring and inspection – key word being “basic.”
There were two big problems with some of these legacy solutions:
- They provide limited sight and are not sensitive enough to pick up some of the most complex and costly surface defects.
- With limited connectivity, these systems don’t allow operators to take real-time action to prevent costly damage or downtime.
A leading global paper manufacturer approached us to help them find a solution for both of these problems. In this case, undetected coating build-up or streaks were causing costly damage and downtime.
Coating build-up happens quickly (7-10 seconds) meaning Operators cannot detect it. In this case, an existing vision system (optical cameras) wasn’t sensitive enough. After installing our hardware and training and deploying our machine learning models, we saw the number of streak events drop from 30 to 0. Based on this success, our solution was deployed on two additional machines at that facility and we recently deployed on another one of the company’s machines in Europe.
One of the key benefits of our solutions is the ability to scale. We can take learning and insights gained on an initial deployment to get up and running even faster on additional machines or factories. That means our paper customers see a faster return on investment.
Contact us today to learn more about how our proven solution can help you “see better paper.”