Thus, the better pulp quality control has multiplied effects on several factors in the society in terms of savings in the natural resources and of environmental load. Microscopy and image analysis have been applied on measuring pulp quality in research laboratories. Mostly the studies have concentrated on measuring some specific feature and efforts have been made to correlate these measurement with some process data or paper quality. The results have not been very convincing due to the small amount of data obtainable by ordinary microscopy. The system can, in principle, be installed on-line and produce fines quality measures every ten minutes.
Today there are few feasible methods for on-line measurement of pulp.
Some laboratory methods are based on manual fiber imaging, which is laborious and do not give a sufficient number of images for statistical consideration in a reasonable time. Thus, it is obvious that an automatic imaging device should be developed. An automatic device for pulp quality would be a valuable tool for controlling the whole paper-making process, including pulp treatment, energy cost and end product quality. Image acquisition and processing. A sample of the pulp is fractionated and each fraction is diluted into water with some detergent to avoid flocking.