On a modern tissue manufacturing machine, the trend is to monitor and measure as much about the process as possible. One critical aspect in this process is the set and condition of the Yankee doctors.  Proper set up and operation of Yankee doctors is crucial to producing first quality product and to maintaining the health of the Yankee. When operating a machine 24/7 from outage to outage, it’s just not feasible to check the alignment and profile of the Yankee doctors. And waiting until downtime is often too late. However, checking the wear pattern and blade angle is possible between outages.

The wear pattern and blade angle can be checked in a variety of ways including microscopes, goniometers and putty impressions. The downfall of these methods is a lack of accuracy and subjectivity based on the individual taking the measurements.  Also, these processes take time, so measurements are often limited to a couple of areas on the blade not painting an entire picture.

Kadant developed the Blade View™ measurement device to alleviate many of these measurement problems. The Blade View measurement device allows for quick and accurate measurement of both wear pad width and wear angle across multiple points of a blade in a single step. The information is stored and graphed to provide a real-time profile of the blade during operation (see graph example below). This data provides immediate feedback pertaining to important parts of the process such as Yankee chemistry, moisture profile, spray boom issues and doctor profile and alignment.  More importantly, it provides time for corrections to be made before damage can occur.