A tool breakage detection system using load signals of spindle motors in CNC machines

This paper presents a new method for detecting tool breakages at CNC machines in real time. Corruptions of CNC tools in the manufacturing industry are a major impact on production management and quality control in the factories maintaining large quantities of CNC machines. Accordingly, from the viewpoint of an equipment management, monitoring damages of tools in real time is essential tasks. Solutions for this problems is to assign enough monitoring operators and they should continue this jobs for 24 hours. It is possible to occur human errors potentially during all-day monitoring processes, and these kind of tasks increase production costs. Thus, we propose a novel method to detect breakages of tools automatically, which detects a fracture state of tools using signals of CNC spindle motor loads. In addition, we presented the applied results of the proposed method to a manufacturing site.