Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic (CFRP) materials which are superlight in weight and have high strength have recently been applied in the automobile and aerospace industry, etc. to achieve high fuel efficiency. CFRP is termed as ‘difficult to cut material’ due to its unique material properties. It’s considered to be highly sensitive in processing due to its laminated structure which would pose some challenges such as delamination, Pull-out, Burr and Uncut. Due to this, it’s maintenance and treatment costs are high. There are also limitations in the conventional Gantry Machine in 3D shape cutting of CFRP materials. To counter this challenge, a robotic abrasive waterjet system with the following features has been developed and installed on site; a high-pressure pump, monitoring system and a catcher for 3D Shape cutting., It’s performance has been successfully proved. Based on the result, we discovered that a 6 axes robot could execute 3D shape cutting of car hood due to its high movement flexibility. In the future it is projected to fulfill more kinds of CFRP materials cutting test on many car brands.

A monitoring system is necessary to make the polishing process more reliable in order to ensure the high quality and performance of the final products. Generally, AE (Acoustic Emission) is known to be closely related to the material removal rate (MRR). As the surface becomes rougher, the MRR and AE increase. Therefore, the surface roughness can be indirectly estimated using the AE signal measured during the polishing. In this study, an AE sensor-based monitoring system was fabricated to detect the very small AE signal resulting from the friction between a tool and a workpiece during polishing. The performance of this monitoring system was estimated according to polishing conditions, the relation between the level of the AE RMS and the surface roughness during the polishing was investigated.

In case of fine machining processes, the cutting state monitoring by a skilled operator is impossible because the physical changes generated during fine machining are very weak. To realize the high efficient and precise fine machining, it is necessary to develop the sensor based monitoring system which is able to detect the fine changes of cutting state. In this paper, the fine acoustic emission monitoring system is developed to monitor the state of the fine machining process. The developed system consists of the AE sensor and the AE signal processing unit. And this has the high-sensitivity and bandwidth which can detect fine AE signal generated during fine machining process. In order to investigate the feasibility of the developed system, evaluation experiments were performed in the fine fixed-abrasive machining processes such as polishing and glass ferrule slicing. Experimental results show that the developed monitoring system possesses an excellent real-time monitoring capability at fine machining processes.