Development of portable power monitoring system and grinding analytical tool

Grinding is one of the most critical surface finishing processes to meet the demand of tight tolerance, good surface integrity, high productivity and low cost in manufacturing industries. However, grinding is considered to be a complex and highly non-stationary process owing to a huge number of irregular cutting edges in abrasive tools. The abrasive tool and process condition monitoring is a well-recognized approach to track process change and analyze tool condition. In this work, we developed a portable power monitoring system with specially designed grinding analytical software. The hardware architecture and software modules were introduced in detail. The main functions in the software module comprised of signals acquisition, feature extraction and data calculation, and data analytical toolkit. Knowledge-based analytical tool was established through the correlation between grinding power/energy and grinding conditions. The actual application of the portable power monitoring system for grinding process was further demonstrated with some case studies. The developed portable power monitoring system is easy and convenient to implement in production conditions for improvement and optimization of grinding process.