Development of monitoring system on the diamond tool wear

Recently, ultra-precision machining using a single crystal diamond tool has been developing very rapidly, especially in the fields of production processes for optical or magnetic parts such as magnetic discs, laser mirrors, polygon mirrors and copier drums. As a result, it has been successfully extended to machine various soft materials, generating mirror-like surfaces to sub-micron geometric accuracy with the ultraprecision CNC machine and the single crystal diamond tool. With the real cutting operation, the geometric accuracy and the surface finish attainable in machined surfaces are mainly determined by both of the sharpness of a cutting tool and stability of the machine vibration. In this study, for monitoring the progress of machining state for assuring the machining accuracy and the surface quality, a new monitoring method of machining states in face-cutting with diamond tool is proposed, using the frequency response of multisensors signal, which includes wear state of tool in terms of the energy within the specific frequency band. A magnetic disc is machined on the ultra-precision lathe. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.