Application of machine learning for feet‑based condition monitoring of ball screw drives in machine tools

Kategorien Zeitschriften/Aufsätze (reviewed)
Jahr 2023
Autorinnen/Autoren Denkena, B., Dittrich, M.-A., Noske, H., Lange, D., Benjamins, C., Lindauer, M.:
Veröffentlicht in The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology (2023), published online 23. May 2023, S.1144-1163.
Beschreibung

Ball screws are frequently used as drive elements in the feed axes of machine tools. The failure of ball screw drives is associated with high downtimes and costs for manufacturing companies, which harm competitiveness. Data-based monitoring approaches derive the ball screw condition based on sensor data in cases where no knowledge is available to derive a physical model-based approach. An essential criterion for selecting the condition assessment method is the availability of fault data. In the literature, fault patterns are often artifcially created in an experimental test bench scenario. This paper presents ball screw drive monitoring approaches for machine tool feets based on machine learning. First, the potentials of automated machine learning for supervised anomaly detection are investigated. It is shown that the AutoML tool Auto-Sklearn achieves a higher monitoring quality compared to literature approaches. However, fault data are often not available. Therefore, unifed outlier scores are applied in a semi-supervised anomaly detection mode. The unifed outlier score approach outperforms threshold-based approaches commonly used in industry. The considered data set originates from a machine tool feet used in series production in the automotive industry collected over 8 months. Within the observation period, multiple ball screw failures are observed so that sensor data about the transient phases between normal and fault conditions is available.

DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-023-11524-9