Monitoring system for free form modeling machines at Digital Mechanics

Abstract: Digital Mechanics is a company in Västerås manufacturing mainlyprototypes for it customers. To do this they use a number of free formingmachines. The building time of these machines differ very much from theestimated time required to build a job and this effects the efficiency of theproduction. The work presented in this paper is mainly about designing andconstructing a monitoring application for the machines at DigitalMechanics. The application will be used for alerting the operators when amachine is not building and preempt machines stopping because they runout of material to increase quality and efficiency in the production. Thesystem may also be used as the core of a future, more advanced, monitoringsystem.The thesis also included a study about how the estimation of the timerequired by the machines to build a job could be enhanced.Because of the nature of the business at Digital Mechanics theimprovement of quality and efficiency deriving from this monitoringapplication is difficult to measure, but the machine operators claim they areassisted by it.