A novel tool monitoring approach for diamond wire sawing

Abstract

Mobile diamond wire sawing is a highly flexible, productive and, versatile cutting process. Accordingly, it is used in many areas, such as the dismantling of nuclear power plants or wind turbines. Despite the widespread use of the process, the cutting process requires continuous manual monitoring by the machine operator. This is due to the continuously changing cutting conditions. A common process error is tool breakage. It is often caused by the displacement of the grinding segments (cutting beads). Due to the cutting speed (up to 30 m/s), these failures cannot be detected and prevented by the machine operator. However, a measuring system or process monitoring does not exist yet. Accordingly, a damaged diamond wire can become hooked, which often results in wire breaks. As a result, grinding segments break away from the wire, which can lead to deadly accidents. Therefore, a new approach for monitoring the tool for diamond wire grinding will be investigated. The paper is divided into five sections. First, the requirements for the sensor system are derived. After the selection of a measuring principle and the functional verification in the grinding process, the monitoring approach is presented and features for monitoring the tool with regard to the displacement of grinding segments are described. It was shown that the developed approach is suitable for monitoring the diamond wire tool during the sawing process. The investigation on a prepared diamond wire tool also demonstrated that the feature allows the detection of displacing grinding segments already from 2 mm.