Reconfigurable Monitoring Process
Reconfigurable Process Monitoring address issues in manufacturing which need to be altered or changed so that the manufacturing system is flexible and guarantees maximun output.
In the manufacturing industry, maintaining a good quality of toools is extremely important especially in the cutting, forging, turning and drilling machines. Tolls need to be sharp and any tool breakage or tool wear need to be detected and repalced.
Goal: Develop a online monitoring program that can detect sharp and worn tools.
Purpose: Drilling is a dominant process in the present manufacturing industry. The purpose of drilling is to output quality holes. At some stage the drill passes from a usable stage to a worn stage which leades to production of unsatisfactory holes.
Detection of this worn tool is critical because a worn drill will result in the production of poor parts or even parts that need to be scrapped. Hence early detection is crucial as it will save the cost of scrapping and the time involved in stoppage of the manufacturing line.
Methodolgy
The monitoring of the drill involves placing of a sound, vibration and acoustic emmission sensor near the machining area.
When a hole is drilled, these sensors pick up the noise(signals) which is trnasformed to data acquisition programs.
Data Acquisition
We have developed a data acquisition program using LabView. Labview utilises programs such as FFT, Descrete Wavelet Transform and hidden markhov models.
The FFT, Descrete Wavelet Transform programs display data on a graph with frequency domain, thus making convienient for recognizing patterns in a signal representation. The Hidden Markhov Model is a program developed through LabView to analyse the signals.
The patterns developed help identify whether a tool is sharp or worn.
The research has suggested that a program that uses online monitoring to detect tool wear can be developed.
The next steps in this project will be developing monitoring systems for processes other than drilling-like forging, pressing and turning.
In the future this online monitoring program and data analysis system once developed can save companies thousands of dollars. The program will make tool wear detection an effective and reliable process. There will be optimum use of tools and the loss due to tool defect will be minimized.
To conclude there will be more efficiency in the manufacturing industry.