Development of a Condition Based Maintenance Program for a CNC Machine: Part 1—Signal Acquisition, Processing, and Network Communication

Abstract

Condition based maintenance (CBM) of machine tools is an important maintenance strategy to invoke for a manufacturing company to run as lean as possible. CBM does this by indicating, in advance, the failure of the machine tool components or system, thus reducing the machine downtime. In this paper, the development of such a system is sought. A background review of the need and structure of such a system has been provided as well as the design considerations for the system are discussed. Having those considerations as the target requirements for a CBM system, discussion of a demonstrative system is presented, being implemented on an OKUMA LB 3000EX CNC lathe. Leveraging the Open Architecture Control (OAC) technology built into OKUMA CNC systems, the proposed system shall enhance machine monitoring by integrating the internal and external sensors aboard the machine tool. This work lays the foundation for the framework of a proposed CBM system. Coolant temperatures and spindle vibration signals are acquired and processed using a high speed data acquisition system. Towards the end of the paper, descriptions of how to best use this data and integrate it with the machine tool CNC system have been provided.