Condition-based preventive maintenance of main spindles
Machine tools need to be highly reliable with minimal down time. Unintended failure incurs high costs due to repairs and production losses. Maintenance is a major cost factor and is still handled reactively to a great extent. Maintenance plans by manufacturers that recommend preventive maintenance based on operating hours are often not consistently implemented. Ideally condition-dependent preventive maintenance of the most critical and cost-intensive assemblies of a machine tool would be performed. This would enable a shift of planned maintenance times to non-productive periods and would also enable procuring any spare parts at the right time. Eventually, this would lead to cost savings. This article describes the design of a condition monitoring system for machine tools and shows examples of main spindle monitoring.