In the weaving industry a variety of meshes are manufactured,nusing both metallic and nonmetallic materials, for a wide variety ofnfiltration applications. At present the quality of the mesh is monitorednat several stages of the manufacturing process to keep selectednparameters within specified limits. This involves stopping the processnapproximately every half hour, manually assessing the mesh quality, andntaking remedial action as necessary. There is a need to replace thesenmanual checks with an automatic system that can continually monitor thenmesh as it is being manufactured and, with appropriate actuators,ncontrol the loom on-line. The authors present initial results ofnresearch being conducted at Sheffield University to develop such ansystem for wire mesh. Early experiments proved that a contactnmeasurement technique is inappropriate due to the severe vibrations andnbacklash nonlinearities present in most looms. The approach adopted herentherefore, is to use image processing techniques. The instrument isntransputer based so that the image processing can be performed onnseveral processors to achieve the real-time performance necessary fornon-line monitoring and control purposes
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