Monitoring the state of mechanical machine tool components is of growing importance for increasing machine tool availability and reducing inspection efforts and costs. Open numerical controls offer a new opportunity for getting access to signals of drives as well as of the control itself and to integrate the end-user's individual applications. Because the actual drive signals contain information on the mechanical behaviour of the drive chain components, their use for condition monitoring mechanical drive components is a reliable and cost effective approach. The paper presents a new approach on using digital drive signals for a control integrated condition monitoring system to monitor typical disturbances like backlash and pittings on guideways.

Process monitoring is the key to an increasing degree of automation and consequently to an increasing productivity in manufacturing. The realization of process monitoring functionality demands an extension of the control system. The prerequisite for these extensions are open interfaces in the NC-kernel. Nowadays controls with open NC-kernel interfaces are available on the market. However these interfaces are vendor specific solutions that do not allow the reuse of monitoring software in different controls. To overcome these limitations a vendor neutral open real-time interface for the integration of process monitoring functionality into the NC-kernel is presented. Additionally two implementations of the real time interface for different target systems are described.