Hard- and Software Fusion for Process Monitoring During Machining of Fiber Reinforced Materials

Machining of fiber reinforced composites remains a challenging process at the end of the value chain. Malfunctions of machinery and bad surface quality cause a tremendous loss of value and need to be reduced to increase competitiveness in lightweight applications. Monitoring of machining steps can be carried out by many different techniques and strategies all with their unique benefits and drawbacks. These provide information about machining hours, wear status of the tool, potential malfunctions of the system and can estimate the quality of the machining process. This contribution presents an approach to fuse different sensing systems on the hard- and software side to combine the information of different systems that provide a consolidated basis for the analysis of the machine status, tool status and machining quality. To this end we present results from a sensor fusion approach to measure acoustic information during the machining and the software framework UHU that was developed to provide a blueprint for a real-time capable environment for CNC feedback control and machining quality documentation.