Final Technical Report of project: "Contactless Real-Time Monitoring of Paper Mechanical Behavior During Papermaking"

The early precursors of laser ultrasonics on paper were Prof. Y. Berthelot from the Georgia Institute of Technology/Mechanical Engineering department, and Prof. P. Brodeur from the Institute of Paper Science and Technology, both located in Atlanta, Georgia. The first Ph.D. thesis that shed quite some light on the topic, but also left some questions unanswered, was completed by Mont A. Johnson in 1996. Mont Johnson was Prof. Berthelot's student at Georgia Tech. In 1997 P. Brodeur proposed a project involving himself, Y. Berthelot, Dr. Ken Telschow and Mr. Vance Deason from INL, Honeywell-Measurex and Dr. Rick Russo from LBNL. The first time the proposal was not accepted and P. Brodeur decided to re-propose it without the involvement from LBNL. Rick Russo proposed a separate project on the same topic on his side. Both proposals were finally accepted and work started in the fall of 1997 on the two projects. Early on, the biggest challenge was to find an optical detection method which could detect laser-induced displacements of the web surface that are of the order of .1 micron in the ultrasonic range. This was to be done while the web was having an out-of-plane amplitude of motion in the mm range due to web flutter; while moving at 10 m/s to 30 m/s in the plane of the web, on the paper machine. Both teams grappled with the same problems and tried similar methods in some cases, but came up with two similar but different solutions one year later. The IPST, GT, INL team found that an interferometer made by Lasson Technologies Inc. using the photo-induced electro-motive force in Gallium Arsenide was able to detect ultrasonic waves up to 12-15 m/s. It also developed in house an interferometer using the Two-Wave Mixing effect in photorefractive crystals that showed good promises for on-line applications, and experimented with a scanning mirror to reduce motion-induced texture noise from the web and improve signal to noise ratio. On its side, LBNL had the idea to combine a commercial Mach-Zehnder interferometer to a spinning mirror synchronized to the web speed, in order to make almost stationary measurements. The method was demonstrated at up to 10 m/s. Both teams developed their own version of a web simulator that was driving a web of paper at 10 m/s or higher. The Department of Energy and members of the Agenda 2020 started to make a push for merging the two projects. This made sense because their topics were really identical but this was not well received by Prof. Brodeur. Finally IPST decided to reassign the direction of the IPST-INL-GT project in the spring of 1999 to Prof. Chuck Habeger so that the two teams could work together. Also at this time, Honeywell-Measurex dropped as a member of the team. It was replaced by ABB Industrial Systems whose engineers had extensive previous experience of working with ultrasonic sensors on paperboard. INL also finished its work on the project as its competencies were partly redundant with LBNL. From the summer of 1999, the IPST-GT and LBNL teams were working together and helped each other often by collaborating and visiting either laboratory when was necessary. Around the beginning of 2000, began an effort at IPST to create an off-line laser-ultrasonics instrument that could perform automated measurements of paper and paperboard's bending stiffness. It was widely known that the mechanical bending tests of paper used for years by the paper industry were very inaccurate and exhibited poor reproducibility; therefore the team needed a new instrument of reference to validate its future on-line results. In 1999-2000, the focus of the on-line instrument was on a pre-industrial demonstration on a pilot coater while reducing the damage to the web caused by the generation laser, below the threshold where it could be visible by the naked eye. During the spring of 2000 Paul Ridgway traveled to IPST and brought with him a redesigned system still using the same Mach-Zehnder interferometer as before, but this time employing an electric motor-driven spinning mirror instead of the previously belt-driven mechanical spinning mirror. For testing we chose to use a 1 foot-wide paper loop running on IPST's large scale web handler which could reach a web speed of 2,000 feet/min (10.16 m/s). This was more representative of the conditions encountered of a pilot coater, than on a table-top scale web simulator.

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