Condition monitoring of machine tool feed drives in aero engine manufacturing

Condition monitoring of machine tool feed drives has long been subject of research and preliminary results have already merged into commercial software solutions offered by machine tool manufacturers and numeric control manufacturers. However, when it comes to industrial applications, the effectiveness of the results proposed in the state of the art has only been discussed insufficiently. In other words, there is a lack of testimonials from industrial users. This paper addresses this by describing an in-house developed condition monitoring system for machine tool feed drives in aero engine manufacturing. The paper shows that, if thoroughly implemented, even simple approaches from the state of the art can lead to significant cost benefits in the operation and maintenance of the used machine tools.