Figure 2.  Former and press data acquisition equipment 
monitoring 56 vibration and 4 tachometer channels. 

 

 

Figure 3.  Dryer and calender stack monitoring equipment 
32 vibration and 2 tachometer channels. 

 
Cabling was a problem in itself.  The paper machine is approximately 10 metres in width, 10 
meters in height and 100 meters in length.   Running individual coaxial cable from each 
transducer back to the appropriate connector on the monitoring instrumentation could have been 
done.  However, the time to install the monitoring equipment, the aggravation factor, and the 
probability of bad connections or loss of signals would have been much larger.  To save cable 
length and time, three “umbilical” cables were used to run to the back side of the paper machine.  
The umbilical consists of a cable bundle in its own insulation sheet that contains multiple 
individual shielded conductors.  The ends of the umbilical cables have serial connectors that 
attach to a box at each end with BNC connectors for each channel.  Three 30 metre umbilical