Abstract:

　A new technique, based on the digital image analysis, is developed for the measurement of fiber orientation in the dilute fiber suspension flow. Applications for measurement of fiber orientation of dilute suspension flow in a converging nozzle of a headbox have produced interesting results and new insight. Further extension to automatic fiber orientation measurement of the successive images is the next step in the development.
　The method involves several steps including binarization, skeletonization and pixel-based orientation measurement. During this process, technical difficulties exist in the measurement with signal noises and intersected fiber network and the strategies to overcome are described in the paper. The results of relatively detailed fiber orientation measurements in the headbox flow including the polar diagrams are presented. In addition, the potential application of this method for characterization of paper structure will be discussed.