Paper Tissue Softness Rating by Acoustic Emission Analysis

Softness is one of the essential properties of hygiene tissue products. Reliably measuring it is of utmost importance to ensure the balance between customer expectations and cost-effective tissue production. This study presents a method for assessing softness by analyzing acoustic emissions produced while tearing a tissue specimen. The aim was to train neural network models using the corrected results of human panel tests as the ground truth labels and to predict the tissue softness in two- and three-class recognition tasks. We also investigate the possibility of predicting some production parameters related to the softness property. The results proved that tissue softness and production parameters could be reliably estimated only by the tearing noise.