Use of 'on-line optical microscopy' for monitoring compounding and other polymer processing operations

The 'On-line Optical Microscopy System' was developed in the five-year-old industrially co-sponsored Polymer Mixing Study at the Polymer Processing Institute. This system has a functionality of a potential on-line sensor to monitor compounding and other polymer processing operations. The greatest advantage of this technology over SEM is that many images with a pseudo-three dimensional feature can be captured and analyzed in a short period time. Although the current on-line microscopy is effective, it has some challenging problems: (a) isolation of vibration generated from mixers or processing equipment and (b) narrow range of magnification compared to SEM.