Development Of The Condition Monitoring System For The Disc-type Tool Changer

The development of Manufacturing prompts the national economy’s progressand also boosts the demand and sales of CNC machine tools, which makes its effectsand application fields becoming more and more prominently and widely. In recentyears, with the insistent increasement of CNC manufacturing equipments’ investment,the development of CNC machine tools in China have also achieved obvious progress,especially in the direction of multi-function, high precision, high efficiency. However,there is still a big gap between the national CNC machine tools and the same productsabroad, especially in the field of slap-up CNC machine tools. Unable to maintain theadvanced function and performance index of the machine tools, the reliability level islow, which seriously influences the reputation and market share of domestic CNCmachine tools. The key features have important influence on the reliability of theCNC machine tools, such as CNC lathe turret head, the Disc-type Tool Changer andmanipulator are the weak part of the domestic CNC machine tools’ reliability, whichbecome the key components affecting the reliability of the whole machine.Through constructing CNC machine tool key features reliability test system,developing the long-term reliability laboratory bench test, exploring and inspiring thepotential failures and weaknesses, effective improvement suggestions and measuresare put forward and implemented, which has the vital significance in promoting thereliability level of the CNC machine tools. Taking Disc-type Tool Changer of YPseries as the research object, the paper completes the development of the conditionmonitoring system, which is beneficial to not only improve the automation ability ofthe Disc-type Tool Changer tool test system and self-protection ability, but also laidthe foundation of failure warning and failure diagnosis for the subsequent Disc-typeTool Changer research.Firstly, this article analyses the main structures and functional features ofDisc-type Tool Changer in detail and dissects the frequent failure modes and reasonsbased on the long-term field failure data.Based on the result of failure analysis, the paper researched the functionalrequirements and design ideas of the Condition Monitoring System for the Disc-typeTool Changer. According to the structural characteristics of the Disc-type Tool Changer and monitor signal, the monitoring plan is built and the condition monitoringhardware system is developed.The paper develops the Condition Monitoring System software for the Disc-typeTool Changer, which based on the visual programming language Visual Basic6.0andAccess database. The software mainly includes User Information Management, TestInformation Management and the Condition Signal Monitoring etc, which isprominent in the aspects of object-oriented design and human-computer interaction.The design of User Information Management realizes the multi-user demands andguarantees the standardization and the security of the system operation. The design ofTest Information Management provides convenient channel for the users toacknowledge to understand, query and update the configuration information of thewhole system and the failure information of the Disc-type Tool Changer. As the corepart of the system.The design of condition monitoring module takes full advantage ofthe characteristics of the sensor technology and computer technology and achieves thesignals’ high-speed acquisition and storage. Besides, the system realizes thepretreatment of the signal waveform output and the signal features extraction throughthe digital signal filtering technology and time domain analysis technology. Inaddition, the program is developed by VB and PLC which is used for monitoring thecondition of the tools exchanging and implementing the failure alarm. The Accessdatabase for ensuring the integrity and convenience of the system data informationdevelopment is carried on in the process of the entire software system design.According to the comprehensive experimental analysis, the ConditionMonitoring System for the Disc-type Tool Changer can realize the informationoperation and management, the signal monitoring and other functions of the testsystem, which achieves the design purpose and has vital application value inimproving the reliability for the Disc-type Tool Changer.