Manufacturing Productivity Not Cutting It?

Vibration plays an important role in manufacturing facilities with rotating machinery processes such as steel and paper formation, power generation and a variety of manufacturing processes employing high-speed cutting and milling. In order to obtain maximum material removal (efficiency), along with good surface quality, the feed and speed of the cutting has to be optimized. In high speed milling, this is directly affected by a number of factors including the sharpness of the cutting bit, the depth of the cut, and the rate of traverse of the cut.

 Vibration monitoring can be a key to safeguarding performance, reliability and quality.  For example, to monitor tool wear, the vibration signature of a sharpened tool is different from a dull tool. The ability to measure the difference between the two can alert to the need to replace the instrument. This, in turn, can lead to increased productivity and quality by ensuring maximum feed rates with adequate and quality material removal.

A second key to safeguarding quality is the capability from the vibration signature monitoring to distinguish cutting bit and part interaction leading to chatter. Attempting to remove too much material in a single pass or traverse too quickly during the cut can induce a dynamic effect, which causes the cutting bit to chatter or “bounce” which leaves and irregular scoring in the surface finish of the cut part.  Chatter can lead to rejected or degraded surface finish quality along with degradation of tool life and reduced throughput.

The Digiducer™ USB digital accelerometer simplifies high fidelity, ruggedized vibration monitoring. The Digiducer is portable and uses the standardized USB audio interface, which makes it compatible with virtually any phone, tablet, or laptop. There are dozens of applications available to support the USB digital accelerometer input directly into data recording and frequency analysis packages.  This means that you can record all of the test measurements that you need and analyze them on the plant floor, back them up in storage, and email the test data to another location for a second opinion.

See what you’ve been missing… Add Digiducer to get economical and ruggedized real-time vibration analysis on the mobile devices you already own.