Power Consumption Monitoring for Tool Wear Detection
Why Power Consumption Tracks Wear As a gun drill wears, the cutting edge dulls. A dull edge requires more force to shear the material, and the spindle motor draws more power to maintain the programmed RPM. The power increase is proportional to the edge wear. I have verified this relationship by measuring power consumption against measured edge wear across dozens of tools. The correlation is consistent enough that I trust the power reading as a wear indicator without stopping the machine to inspect the edge. ...