a plurality of cascaded threshold levels the man skilled in the art can easily determine by experiment the shape of such damped oscillations for any kind of polymer and a piece of equipment then he sets and adjusts one or more threshold levels by way of example 3 levels are fixed level 1 is the higher level 2 is lower and then level 3 lower than level 2 the damped oscillations are such by way of example that there are two oscillations above level 1 one oscillation above level 2 but under level 1 and 2 oscillations above level 3 but under level 2 it is decided that this corresponds to one shot in the polymer formation optionally a pulse counter is connected to the conditioner unit whenever an oscillation is over a threshold level a pulse is counted the number of pulse for every threshold level is displayed and or recorded optionally the time during which an oscillation is over a threshold level is counted optionally the time during which an oscillation is over a threshold level is compared with a time set analysis of these data gives a good prediction of the polymer formation advantageously display of measurements and analysis of data are made by a computer in a.