Guide to UV Measurement
How Often Should I Measure?
How often should you monitor and take UV readings? By the job? Hour? Shift? Day? There is no set or easy answer.
Some factors to consider to you help determine how frequent you should measure:
- The type of product being produced and the liability if it is not cured properly? Are you curing adhesive bonds on a cardiac catheter or are you curing overprint varnish on a magazine cover?
- The value and process speed of the material that you are running through your process. Is it a relatively low cost paper stock or a very expensive specialized film? Are you running in feet per minute or hundreds of feet per minute? What is your dollar exposure if an entire shift of product needs to be scrapped?
- How well do you know your process?
- How well do you know your equipment? How stable is it?
- In what type of operating environment do you run production? Dusty manufacturing floor with lots of wood or paper dust? Medical grade clean room with operators that are in gowns?
- How well is your staff trained?
- What documentation requirements do you have from your customers?
Let the answers to the questions above and the information that you collect about your process dictate the frequency of readings. It is much easier to collect more readings at first to establish a baseline with the idea that you can always back off later in the frequency of readings after you look for trends in the data.