If you are hoping to improve your experience while surfing the web, then, web inspection systems will do absolutely nothing for you since they are something totally disassociated with the World Wide Web (www and the internet). In this context, a web is a large roll of relatively thin material – such as the rolls of paper that go into a web offset printing press.
Which Webs Need Inspecting?
To those in the know, this meaning of the word “web” is taken for granted. Webs can be produced from any material that is flexible and the process usually includes rolling the material which could be paper, metal foil or plastic film. Although most webs will end up being cut into sheets – the pages of a magazine for example – industries that use them prefer the high speed at which a web can be fed through their processing equipment and be cut once the process is complete (as against feeding individual sheets into the process machinery). It is in the manufacture and use of these webs that web inspection systems play an important role.
In some cases, the initial web may be further processed by a converter company before it is used in the final production of something else. For example, a converter may laminate two or more webs together by applying a layer of adhesive to one side of a paper web or plastic film and then adding a bottom layer of release paper.
Thus three raw material webs are converted into one web that could then be feed into a web offset printing press to print out self adhesive labels for use in packaging or anywhere else where they might be required. All the webs involved in this conversion should have had their production monitored and checked by web inspection systems.
Web Handling
From initial production, through any converting and on to the final usage, there is a major obstacle to the use of webs. This is the difficulty in getting the long length of thin, flexible material to pass correctly through the processing machinery as fast as possible without wastage. Web alignment is critical to this, if the fast moving web tracks off course and wanders out of alignment it could snag and possibly break. If it does not break and if the web is to be printed, then the printing could become skewed on the end result.
For this reason, web inspection systems not only cover the quality of web production, they are also used to monitor a webs progress through the processing equipment. This is usually achieved by strategically placed cameras linked to computers that have been programmed to identify any web problems and take action – this might be simply to warn the operators or it could involve stopping the process machine.
