Development of Real-time Grinding Process Monitoring and Analysis System

The success of the manufacturing process which involves grinding as one of the stages depends solely on the accuracy of the grinding process. Being the last stage of the manufacturing path, it is mostly done to provide the desired surface finish to the product. This makes the stage very crucial. To prevent the ruining of all the previous stages and efforts, the real-time monitoring of the grinding stage becomes necessary which will make a room for better production planning and avoidance of failure occurrence. Conventionally the quality is dependent on the machine behavior as well as the operator’s skill. To make the process in par with the latest industry 4.0, real-time process monitoring of the grinding process with the use of a vibration sensor is considered. The developed system in the paper focusses on the monitoring of the process behavior and log the occurred changes. The hardware architecture and software modules are introduced in detail and the application of the developed system is demonstrated with the grinding of an automotive part. The developed system is convenient to use and very helpful in improving the overall productivity of the brake disc production facility by reducing the quality failures and hence saving the resources.