For a decade now, industrial sensors have been commercially available to both academia and industry. In general, these sensors measure individual and/or bulk properties of the powders being sprayed. Experience has shown that normally, researchers will tend to favor sensors with high spatial resolution like the DPV 2000, because of the fundamental information they give about the plume structure. Such information is vital for proper gun design and spray parameter optimization.

However, for process monitoring applications typically done with a sensor like the AccuraSpray, it is often more convenient to measure bulk properties over a wider volume inside the plume. In this case there is always a tradeoff to be made between spatial resolution and fundamental process understanding.

This papers illustrates this point by comparing two typical optical configurations, one with high spatial resolution and another one with medium resolution. Results clearly show that with minor optical modifications such sensors can be tailored to precise industrial requirements