Subproject C7

Vibration-based monitoring of interactions at cutting wheel - detecting wear


Overview

Wear and reduced service life of TBM-tools counteracts improved efficiency of tunneling processes. Especially unplanned maintenance activities, like necessary unplanned replacement of the cutting discs or even replacement of the complete disc mounting system leads to increased process time and soaring costs. Within C7 the detection and identification of wear and damages of cutting discs is focused. An online monitoring system should continuously check the current disc state and allows to adapt process parameters and maintenance activities. For stationary rotating machinery like gas turbines or bearings, the use of vibration measurements to monitor the condition of the machinery has proven to be successful and sensitive also for minor damages long before failure, enabling condition-based maintenance. As the measurement directly at the disc seems to be impossible for TBM and the tunneling process is not stationary compared to the rotation of a gas turbine, the use of vibration measurement seems to be promising only if it is combined with intelligent feature extraction and pattern recognition. For monitoring systems, which are operating under changing environmental and operational conditions, different means of data analysis enable to distinguish between their influences and damage. These concepts need to be adapted for the tunneling process, where the operating conditions as well as changing soils and rock are supposed to dominate the vibration. Subproject C7 aims to develop a monitoring system to detect and identify wear and damages of cutting discs at the cutting wheel during the cutting process using vibration-based features to enable efficient use of tunnel boring machines.

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