Emission analysis of the cutting tools used for hard rock cutting with regard to status monitoring

For the extraction of medium hard rock cutting machines such as road headers, continuous miners or longwall shearers are often used. The defining parts of these machines are one or more rotary drums equipped with picks. While the picks are in interaction with the rock they emit a wide variety of physical effects like vibration, transient shock emissions, infrared emission, or others which can be analyzed to derive present machine parameters, present tool conditions as well as properties of the material actually being cut. The objective of the present paper is an analysis of these emissions investigating if and how they can be used for status monitoring of the cutting process under laboratory as well as under real conditions. In this case, real conditions refer primarily to cutting speed and cutting forces.