Optical Flank Wear Monitoring of Cutting Tools

An optoelectronic method for in situ monitoring of the flank wear of cutting tools is presented. The method is based on real time vision technology in which the tool is illuminated by the beam of a laser and the wear zone is visualized using a Vidicon camera. The image is converted into digital pixel data and processed, to detect the wear land width. Detailed aspects of the image processing procedures are discussed along with the experimental results. As a conclusion, it has been proved that the average and maximum peak values of the flank wear width can be monitored effectively to a measuring resolution of 0.1 mm.