Web Press Nip Roller Sensor Ensures Print Quality

Edited by the Printingtalk editorial team Apr 6, 2004

Sensor Products introduces TactilusR, a new electronic tactile force and pressure-indicating sensor is useful for measuring nip pressure and roll contact pressure in web offset printing presses.

Sensor Products introduces TactilusR, a new electronic tactile force and pressure-indicating sensor that is particularly useful for measuring nip pressure and roll contact pressure in web offset printing presses.

Tactilus is claimed to reveal inaccurate roll alignment and roll skewing as well as roll cover damage and roll wear.

Any of those issues can result in uneven processing, wrinkled or mottled products, compacted webs, excessive web breaks and blackening during calendering.

Consistent nip width values must be present across the entire roll to ensure a uniform quality final printed product.

Successful parallelism of nipped rollers during roller changing, as well as during routine maintenance can easily be ensured with Tactilus, said the company.

At the heart of the system is a thin flexible sensor skin that is densely packed with thousands of sensing points.

The sensing points can be as close as 1mm (0.04") apart and can collect data as rapidly as 65,000 points per second.

The sensor skin has a minimum thickness of 0.8mm (0.03"), allowing adaptation over curved surfaces or in invasive intolerant environments.

The spatial resolution of Tactilus is fine enough to expose minute surface defects and fatigue marks.

System requirements include Windows 95 (or higher) OS, 16Mb free disk space and 64Mb of RAM.

The Tactilus system allows an engineer to monitor precisely how force is distributed between any two contacting surfaces in real-time.

Any application or test where pressure lies between 0.007 kg/cm2 to 14.10 kg/cm2 (0.1psi to 200psi) is a viable candidate for Tactilus technology.

"Tactilus technology is useful in a large variety of applications in R and D and QC, including, including high-volume web-offset printing, where the system is a valuable process control tool.

In such operations, proper roll alignment and parallelism is crucial," said Carlos Ruiz, Sensor Products' product manager.