Monitoring of Gear Surface Roughness in Angle Grinder using Vibration Analysis

This paper aims to provide the relation between surface roughness of angle grinder towards vibration amplitude. Prolong usage of angle grinder over excessive force will affect the performance of angle grinder where it tends to vibrate due to surface roughness of gear and create excessive vibration that will lead to hand-arm vibration system. Therefore, this study is conducted to investigate surface roughness of the gear teeth of angle grinder affects the amplitude of vibration. The amplitude of the vibration for angle grinder is conducted by using LMS data acquisition system. Meanwhile, the roughness of the gear teeth is measured by using Keyence Laser Confocal Microscope. The data was taken by every 100 hours of grinding process. The results show that the surface roughness of the gear teeth is steadily decreasing due to contact between gears and subsequently resulted increasing the amplitude of the vibration. For 500 hours measurement, the correlation of surface roughness of gear teeth with the amplitude of vibration is 93.7% for marked tooth and 86.5% for adjacent tooth, this indicates the strongest possible agreement that when surface roughness of the gear teeth decreasing, the vibration amplitude is higher.