Why Relative Humidity Matters in Moisture-Sensitive Manufacturing
There's a hygrometer on your shop floor somewhere. Taped to a pillar, screwed in beside the switchboard, or still boxed up in the maintenance store because nobody got round to putting it up. It says 68%. Nobody writes it down. Nothing has gone wrong yet. Then something does. A batch cakes in the hopper. A coated tablet goes tacky. A powder-coated panel comes out of the oven with pinholes down one corner, and the line runs it again. And in the meeting after, people blame the raw material, or the operator, or the vendor, or the weather. We've sat in a few of those meetings. Nobody blames the number on the pillar. That number is relative humidity. In moisture-sensitive manufacturing, it isn't a comfort reading; it's a process parameter, and it belongs in the batch record next to temperature and pressure. We're an industrial dehumidifier supplier, so we walk through plants most weeks where every other input is controlled to a decimal place and the air is just whatever...