Condition-based preventive maintenance of machine tools

Machine tools are expected to be highly available. Unintended failure incurs high costs for repairs and through production losses. Maintenance is a major cost factor and is still mostly reactive today, as a result of failures. Maintenance plans by manufacturers that require preventive maintenance based on running hours are often not implemented consistently. It would be ideal to perform condition-dependent preventive maintenance of the most critical and cost-intensive assemblies of a machine tool. This would make it possible to move repair times into non-productive periods and to procure 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 ways of monitoring the most critical machine tool assemblies.