Research Of On-line Monitoring System For The TBM Disc Cutter’s Wear And Rotational Speed

In recent years, the full-face hard rock tunnel boring machine (TBM) has been widely used in domestic engineering projects, such as road transportation, water conservancy, hydropower, municipal and national defense facilities, etc. The main rock-breaking cutter of the TBM is disc cutter, and monitoring disc cutter’s relevant operating parameters has become an urgent technical problem of the TBM. On the basis of consulting a large amount of domestic and foreign existing documentation about disc cutter monitoring technologies, also on the foundation of non-destructive and non-contact detecting features of eddy current sensor, this paper studies the on-line monitoring methods about disc cutter’s wear and rotational speed. The main research contents are as follows:(1) The different worn morphological characters of the cross section of the worn cutter rings are summarized, then the kinematic analysis of the disc cutter is carried out, thus the equation of rotation velocities of disc cutters installed in different radii of the cutterhead is derived. That contributes to the theoretical basis of building the on-line monitoring system for the disc cutter’s wear and rotational speed.(2) Utilize the eddy current sensor to detect the wear of the disc cutter. Furthermore, the effects of the cutter’s wear distance, the worn morphological characters of the cutter ring as well as the rocks attache to the cutter ring’s surface on the measurement accuracy are analyzed, thus the mathematical formulation about the relationship between the wear distance of the cutter ring and the output voltage of sensor is established. Then the detection devices available for monitoring actual TBM disc cutter’s wear and rotational speed are designed.(3) The circuits applied to conditioning the sensor signal of cutter’s wear and rotational speed are designed. Besides, taking advantage of the K60MCU and RF chip CC2530, suitable circuits applied for disc cutter’s wear and rotational speed measurement and a ZigBee dual-link wireless data communication system is designed respectively. Furthermore, the on-line monitoring system’s PC platform is developed. And the experimental results show the on-line monitoring system for disc cutter’s wear and rotational speed is reliable.