Semi-automatic measurement of microfibril angle on a microrobotic platform

This paper presents an implementation of a method to measure microfibril angle of paper fibers on a microrobotic test bench designed for testing the mechanical properties of paper fibers. The method is based on microscopic transmission ellipsometry and the components required for the measurements are integrated to the platform and the computation algorithm is developed in Matlab. We measured the microfibril angles from 11 fiber samples to demonstrate functionality of the system. The results are promising and show that the method can be applied during manipulation of the fibers. Also, this is the first system for microfibril angle measurement that enables automated measurements.