Evaluation of a Contactless Excitation and Response System for Condition Based Maintenance

Abstract: New environmental regulations as well as the increasing industrial competitiveness have set new more demanding rules on the manufacturing industry. In order to abide by those rules not only from the legal point of view but also to be able survive, manufacturing has to be more sustainable from many aspects, especially the economical one. One way to achieve the previous target is an unfortunately often oversighted aspect of the industry sector, the maintenance strategy. Condition based maintenance, CBM, can be used successfully in the industry and accurate estimation of spindle life time can lead to large savings in downtime and cost. CBM requires accurate sensors and equipment in order to get the right indicators whether equipment performance is deteriorating or not. One performance factor when planning a machining process is chatter vibration and one way to avoid this deteriorating phenomenon is to choose cutting parameters that allow stable machining. Various types of sensors are available for vibration and other CBM related measurements. Depending on the situation, the most applicable sensor is selected. The core of this thesis is to investigate the usefulness of measurements with the contactless excitations and response unit in terms of condition based maintenance. In the first part of the thesis, some of the theoretical aspects of maintenance are extensively elaborated upon and later on, the experimental part is presented along with the results’ discussion. The hardware required by the experiments has been provided by KTH and the experiments took place in two of an automotive industry’s production sites. There have been two visits at site A and one at site B, apart from the initial meetings. The measurements have been analyzed with the use of MATLAB.