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Tool Monitoring Technologies
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Montronix-Deemstop Ltd
The purchase by Montronix Inc, in 1997, was tacit recognition that Deemstop Ltd had effectively established itself as a world leader in the technology of cutting-tool load-monitoring. Amongst its customers, the Company can include most of North America’s car, commercial vehicle and engine manufacturers - and many of Europe’s.
With sole responsibility for all of Deemstop’s product design and development, add2 is proud of the part it has played in the Company’s success.
Whether it be drilling, milling or grinding, the electrical power required to drive a cutting tool varies at different points in the machine cycle. This results in a ‘power profile’ having readily identifiable features such as switch-on surges, speed-change ramps, idling and cutting plateaux and so on. A typical Deemstop system learns the power profile of a given tool/cycle and tracks any subsequent variations in this profile as time goes by. Gradual variations - consistent with normal tool wear - are ignored but any sudden change, such as that caused by a damaged tool or local porosity, can be set-up to raise an alarm and if sufficiently severe, stop the process.
Integrating electronics with embedded software and higher level PC support applications, the Deemstop product range is a fine example of add2’s innovative approach to the design of industrially ‘hardened’ electronic and software products.
To create a successful range of products within tool monitoring complex concepts had to be packaged into simple easy to use packages. add2 did this by designing systems which offer a very simple interface at user level with a graduated range of increasingly complex configuration and analysis tools available for those customers who needed them.
Footnote: add2 did not simply design the products themselves but provided a complete package including on site diagnostic tools, production test equipment and even an animated graphical sales aid to demonstrate the capabilities and benefits of the systems. It was the need to simulate ‘strange’ power profiles that gave add2’s engineers the original impetus to develop
WaveLAB - an arbitrary waveform generator for the PC.
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