Summary: | The Yankee cylinder is used in most of Metso Paper's machines. It is used in the drying and creping process. Since the outcome of these processes largely affect the paper's final quality it is important that the Yankee cylinder behaves in a controlled fashion. One important parameter affecting the behaviour of the Yankee cylinder is its surface temperature. The objective of this thesis was to search for and evaluate methods for measuring the surface temperature of a Yankee cylinder during operation. Metso Paper is looking for a method having an accuracy of ΔT = 1°C, a response time of t<10 ms, and being portable. Three different instruments were tested during the thesis: Thermophone, a contact measurement device currently used by Metso Paper. RAYNGER MX4, a pyrometer from Raytek. FLIR P640, a thermographic camera with a 640x480 focal plane array from FLIR. The instruments were tested by performing measurements on Metso Paper's pilot machine in Karlstad during operation. The measurements revealed drawbacks for all three instruments. The biggest drawbacks of the Thermophone was its response time, t~5 min, and its dependence on the frictional heating of the teflon cup. The frictional heating causes the measured temperature to increase even after 15 min making it hard to know when to stop the measurement. How much the frictional heating affects the measured temperature was difficult to analyse, making it a suggestion for future studies. The biggest drawback of the pyrometer and the thermographic camera is the measurement error due to emissivity errors. Since the Yankee cylinder have a varying surface finish the emissivity varies a lot along the surface introducing temperature errors as large as ΔT=30°C. Two methods that claim to be emissivity independent were investigated; double-band and gold cup pyrometers. Double-band pyrometers require the target to be a grey body and for it to have large temperatures, T>300°C, making this method unsuitable for measuring the surface temperature of the Yankee cylinder. Gold cup pyrometers require the gold hemisphere to have a reflectance of ρ=1. Because of the environment surrounding the Yankee cylinder it would be difficult keeping the gold hemisphere as clean as required making this method unsuitable as well.
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