Monitoring of Tool Wear in Rotary Ultrasonic Machining of Advanced Ceramics

Tool wear and failure monitoring has raised quite a lot of interests among researchers and has consequently been studied in a number of research projects by a number of research organisations. However, few researchers monitored tool wear in rotary ultrasonic machining (RUM) using various sensors. This paper, for the first time in literature, presents an experimental monitoring on tool wear in RUM of silicon carbide (SiC) using accelerometer, force and acoustic emission sensors. A digital microscope was used to observe the actual tool wear during the experiment. After describing the experimental procedures, it presents and discusses the results on tool wear and acceleration signal, force signal and acoustic signal in RUM of SiC.